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THE - /
TRAGEDY OF
PELEE
A NARRATIVE OF PERSONAL EJCBERI-
ENCE AND OBSERVATION /: /./ :' - ,
IN MARTim^k':' ' " '
• * *
BY ' -
GEORGE KENNAN
•-"» * » a t *
\ * * *
NEW YORK
THE OUTLOOK COMPANY
1902
,*••■•
* ••
* ^ * ^ '* ' ' * " -'"-'-^ ^- "
WITH DRAWINGS BY GEORX3^ VARI AlC"* : - ^-'* '*'
--- - : - '
AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE author:
THE NEW YORK
PUBLIC LIBRARY
• •
;T0R, LENOX and
TILOEN FOUNDA1 IQMt
R 1916 L
• • •• * •
•:..••. V:.:-. .v...;.
• ••-•• • • • •
••• •••
• ••
-• • • •
• i
• • •• •
• •
• •
• •
• • • -••
• • • • •
.• • •••
• .iW«i«J>t, 1902, by
. •tTMiT Outlook Company
• ••* •
• VP|i6l£||iVd November, 1902
• a
CONTENTS
PAGE
I — ^The Voyage to Martinique * . * . 3
II— Our Ride to Mont Pelse . . 'ai
III — Basse Pointe and J4q^^6 Rouge 50
IV — In the Track of the Volcanic
Hurricane . ^ . . . . . . 74
V — A Night EruptiOr- ^of Mont
Pelee . . . * . . . . 96'.
VI — Acier and the Calebasse Road jr-24
VII — Climbing the Volcano . . . . . 144
VIII— The Western Slope of Mont
Pelee 163
IX — ^The Wrecked City . . . . 185
X — The Destruction of St. Pierre 201
XI — The Causes of the Catastrophe 228
• • • •
•
•
•
«
A
* . :
, •
«
•
• . •
.«••
C
•
9
-. •.•••••
•..•
•
•
1
•
(
•
•
•
-•
• • * •
•
•
.^•.•.
•
•
'■_
*•••.
•
••
' #
•
• •
• •
• •
• * •
• • •
• •..••• •
t« •• •
'•••
• •'
• •
•• •
•
•
9
• _
• •
•'.''
•• •
I *
• • •
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
rACDfO
PAOB
The night eruption of May 26, from
the road going south from Vive
toward Acier Title
The eruption of May 28, from Acier 20
The central part of St. Pierre ... 40
One of the few streets in St Pierre
whose outlines can be traced . . 40
One of the least obstructed streets in
St. Pierre 49
Valley down which the volcanic deluge
came at Precheur on May 7 . . 49
Father Mary 68
Basse Point 84
An eruption as seen from the church
at Morne Rouge 117
Mont Pelee from Vive on May 27 . 132
TU
FACING
PAGE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Crossing the Lac des Palmistes on the
top of Mont Pelee, June ist . . 149
Looking up one of the Upper Gorges
of the Falaise 164
The village of Trois Fonts . . 181
Remains of a fine private house near
the bluff, St. Pierre 196
St. Pierre, looking south 196
Debris in lower story of a house in St.
Pierre 212
St. Pierre, looking toward the ocean
from near the cemetery . . . . 212
The Riviere Blanche Region . . . 228
THE
TRAGEDY OF
PELfiE
» • > »
• ^ •
I .
THE VOYAG E ; T O M A R^
TiNicno^E
-■ ^ -»
ON the 8th of Mayy^t9p2, the capjaihr
of the French cruiser Suchet <;aKe<i
from Fort de France to the Minister
- fl > •> •
of Marine in Paris that the city of St Pierre,
Martinique, had been completely destroyed
by an eruption of the volcano Mont Pelee ;
that all, or nearly all, of its inhabitants had
perished ; and that thousands of people in
the northern part of the Island, who had fled
in terror from their homes, were in urgent
need of food and help. As soon as the first
reports of the great catastrophe had been con-
firmed, the Government and the people of
the United States took energetic measures for
the relief of the homeless and suffering sur-
vivors. The Secretary of the Navy, by di-
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
rection of the President, ordered to Martin-
ique the cruiser Cincinnati from Santo
Domiiigo • and the tug Potomac from Porto
• •
France and ascertdmthe extent of the disaster;
] Congress made an appropriation of |200,cx:)0
\ for the purchase-^of /ood ; and the cruiser
• :^..- /.Dixie, Captain* BBriyi was ordered to prepare
^''/yj^r^^a and •saiKfttf' -Martinique at the earliest
* •"/.KfidnScttt possiMe," with such relief supplies as
'dbiild &? hastily bought and collected.
On the 13th of May, The Outlook tele-
graphed me " Can you go to Martinique on
the Dixie ? " I replied that I could, and hav-
ing obtained through the courtesy of the
President, an order from the Secretary of the
Navy for transportation, I left Washington
for New York on the midnight train. After
half a day spent in obtaining a tropical outfit,
which was by no means satisfactory or com-
plete, but which there was ho time to make
better, I went on board the Dixie,: Wednes-
day afternoon. May T4, and found tier decks
crowded with army officers, newspaper men
THE VOYAGE TO MARTINIQUE
and scientists, all bound for the scene of the
disaster. Among those who I knew, person-
ally or by reputation, were Professors Russell
and Jaggar, of Ann Arbor and Cambridge ;
Mr. Robert T. Hill of the U. S. Geological
Survey ; Dr. E. O. Hovey of the New York
Museum of Natural History ; Mr. C. E*
Borchgrevink of Antarctic fame ; and Mr. A.
F. Jaccaci of McClure's Magazine. Besides
these there were two French gentlemen who
had friends of financial interests in Martin-
ique ; half a dozen army officers and sur-
geons ; as many more non-commissioned
officers and men from the Commissary De-
partment and Hospital Corps; and finally
the representatives of twenty-two newspapers,
press associations and magazines. How all
of these forty-four passengers were to be taken
to Martinique on a warship that had no pas-
senger accommodations whatever, I could not
quite see ; but I was fully prepared, myself,
to sleep on deck and eat with the bluejackets,
if necessary, and I presumed that most, if not
all, of the army officers, scientists and news-
paper men, had been accustomed to rough-
ing it, and would accommodate themselves
5
THE TRAGEDY OF PELEE
to circumstances with cheerfulness and philo-
sophic equanimity.
It was supposed that the Dixie would sail
at four o'clock Wednesday afternoon ; but at
eight o'clock in the evening relief supplies
were still being hoisted aboard, and we did
not finally get away until half-past nine. Two
hours later we passed Sandy Hook, and the
revolving search-light on the Navesink High-
lands waved a good-bye to us as we steamed
out to sea in the darkness and laid a course
for Martinique by way of the Anegada Pas-
sage.
The next two or three days were mainly
spent in getting acquainted with one another
and with our new and unfamiliar environ-
ment. Most of us were assigned to quarters
below, on the after berth-deck, and slept in
hammocks slung so closely together that the
rather dark and gloomy space under the after
hatch looked like a crowded hospital ward,
with white canvas hammocks in place of cot
beds. The officers of the Dixie tried in every
possible way to make us all comfortable ; but
the best that could be done, so far as sleep-
ing accommodations were concerned, was to
6
THE VOYAGE TO MARTINIQUE
give every man a hammock and twelve square
feet of floor-space on the berth-deck under
the after hatch. Most of us, however, had
slept in hammocks before, and, apart from
the inconvenience of having no place to put
soap, towels, shaving implements, and other
things in daily use, we were fairly comforta-
ble. Those who had neglected in New York
to provide themselves with portable mirrors
were compelled to shave themselves by the
sense of touch — " unsight unseen " — or by
distorted reflections of their sunburned faces
in the bright bottom of a new tin pail ; but
this served merely to develop skill and stim-
ulate ingenuity. The atmosphere of " News-
paper Row " was pervaded by a strong odor
of reconcentrado codfish from the hold un-
derneath ; but Mr. Fife, of the New York
" Evening Post," who was not always able to
go to the ward-room table, declared that even
this had its advantages, inasmuch as it enabled
him to take, by inhalation and absorption,
meals that he should otherwise miss. The
rest of us, to whom inhaled food was more
or less objectionable, breathed it under pro-
test and consoled ourselves with sympathetic
cc
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
anticipation of the joy that that codfish was
going to carry to the hungry volcano victims
of Martinique. If the trade-winds would
only blow in the right direction, our coming
would be heralded in advance by an ancient
and fishlike smell. The codfish, however,
troubled us only at night. We spent our
days, for the most part, in steamer chairs,
under canvas awnings on the quarter-deck ;
some experimenting with photographic cam-
eras; some reading volcano literature, from
The Last Days of Pompeii " to Brigham's
Text-Book of Geology ;" some playing
chess on the ship's big board with Brobding-
nagian chessmen of iron and bronze, and a
few teasing " General Weyler," the ship's
monkey, by showing him an empty glove,
of which he had an extraordinary fear, and
then placating him with beer, which he drank
out of the bottle with as much skill and gusto
as if he had been accustomed to find bottles
of beer growing on cocoanut trees in his na-
tive jungles.
In the evening a dozen of the younger
officers and newspaper men used to get to-
gether in a sheltered place on the quarter
8
THE VOYAGE TO MARTINIQUE
deck with banjos and guitars, and the soft,
steady trade-winds carried away to leeward
the words and music of Kipling's " On the
Road to Mandalav," or the land-lubber's
song,
Mr. Captain, stop the ship!
1 want to get off and walk.
Still later in the evening, two of^our most
distinguished volcano experts would play
ping-pong on the ward-room table, while the
rest of us stood around, criticising the " serv-
ing," and catching erratic balls that seemed
likely to go overboard through the cabin
door. Sometime before midnight we all
went below, put on our pajamas, climbed
(with difficulty) into our swaying hammocks,
imagined that we were in the forecastle of a
cod-fishing schooner on the Grand Banks,
and — ^with some co-operation from the snor-
ers— dreamed of volcanic eruptions and Kra-
katoa catastrophes until morning.
Voyages in unfrequented seas are almost
proverbially tiresome and monotonous ; but
volcano-hunting in the tropics on a United
States cruiser, with half a dozen scientists and
fifteen or twenty bright, fiin-loving newspaper
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
men, is a far from uninteresting occupation.
Man-of-war life, in itself, with its morning and
evening band-music, its gun drills, fire drills,
and "setting-up drills" for the bluejackets
and marines, is much more entertaining than
the life of a transatlantic passenger steamer ;
and when to these are added daily lectures on
deck, storjps of adventure and descriptions of
travel given in the ward-room by men who
have been in all parts of the world, discus-
sions of volcanic phenomena by scientific ex-
perts from Washington, Cambridge, and Ann
Arbor, and rag-time "coon songs" with
banjo and guitar accompaniment on the after
deck in the soft tropical moonlight, the time
passes pleasantly and rapidly.
Friday afternoon, Mr. Borchgrevink, the
Antarctic explorer, gave a lecture on the
forecastle to a crowd of bluejackets, marines,
officers, scientists, and newspaper men ; Sat-
urday we had a lecture from Dr. Hill, of the
Geological Survey, on the structure of the
earth ; Sunday I tried to intimidate the
thermometer and lower the temperature by
giving the men a talk on winter travel in
Arctic Russia ; and Monday Professor Rus-
lO
THE VOYAGE TO MARTINIQUE
sell, of Ann Arbor, explained volcanic phe-
nomena and described a night spent under
125 feet of sno\<^ in the crater of the extinct
volcano Mount Rainier, where the rocks are
still warm enough to melt great caves under
the snow -cap, and where the mountain-
climber may warm himself beside a jet of
hot steam under a snowy roof 125 feet in
thickness.
The journalists, in order not to be outdone
by the scientists and lecturers, organized
themselves into a society to be known as
"The Volcano Volunteers," and began the
publication of a semi-occasional newspaper
entitled " The Dixie." It was typewritten
and had a circulation of only three copies ;
but its advertisements, personals, local items
and marconigrams were things of joy, and
nothing but the lack of press and postal
facilities prevented it from becoming the
most popular, widely read and influential
journal in the whole Sargasso Sea.
We entered the Caribbean by way of the
Anegada Passage, on the morning of Tues-
day, May 20. When I went on deck at six
o'clock, the sun had just risen in an unclouded
ZI
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
sky and we were steaming swiftly, over a tran-
quil sea of luminous light-indigo blue, toward
the high, precipitous, cloud-capped island of
Saba.- — the first of the long chain of volcanic
peaks that stretches across the eastern end of
the Caribbean from north latitude i8° almost
to the coast of South America.
Tropical islands, at first sight, are gener-
ally disappointing in color, if not in form.
The exquisite rich luminous blue of the sea
leads one to expect a corresponding vividness
and freshness of green in the land; and when
the misty silhouette of a mountain peak
ahead loses, gradually, the tender atmospheric
purple of distance and begins to assume its
own natural inherent color, one is surprised
and disappointed to find that its salient slopes,
if not cultivated, have a rusty, semi-arid ap-
pearance, and that its vegetation, although
green, is comparatively dark, dull, and life-
less. The hills of Nova Scotia, or the islands
in the English Channel, when seen in June
at a distance of five or six miles, are much
brighter and fresher, and have far greater
variety in their tints and shades of green, than
any islands I have ever seen in the West In-
12
THE VOYAGE TO MARTINIQUE
dies. Tropical foliage is extremely beauti-
ful and varied in form when seen in detail
and at short range ; but in mass and at a dis-
tance it is disappointing.
In massive ruggedness and grandeur of out-
line, however, the splendid volcanic peaks of
the lesser Antilles leave nothing to be desired.
The island of Saba, moreover, has an interest
of its own not dependent upon color or form.
It is an extinct volcano — or a volcano sup-
posed to be extinct — and nearly all of its in-
habitants live high above the sea in the shal-
low, saucer-like bed of its ancient crater.
There are a few red-roofed houses scattered
here and there in sheltered ravines on its
northern slope ; but the only village on the
island is situated in the volcano's choked-up
throat. The Dutch colonists in this high-
crater village must have had some anxious
days and nights when Mont Pelee and the
Soufriere of St. Vincent burst into smoke
and flame in the early part of May. The
inhabitants of St. Pierre, living at a distance
of more than four miles from the summit of
Mont Pelee, had a chance, at least, of escape;
but if the subterranean disturbance had ex-
13
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
tended to the northern islands of the Wind-
ward group there would have been no hope
for the people living in the crater of Saba.
The principal industries of this rugged,
precipitous island have always been the
building of boats and the ornamentation of
linen by means of what is known as " drawn-
work." Although Saba has neither harbor
nor beach, its inhabitants managed to build
boats on the high mountain slopes and
launched them over precipices by means of
chains and cables. For many years the fish-
ing boats of Saba were regarded as the best to
be had in the Caribbean ; and the drawn-
work of the Saba women, wlych is still of-
fered for sale in St. Thomas and Guadeloupe,
is fully equal to the Mexican product and is
surpasssd only by that of Russia. There is
no other island, perhaps, on the globe, whose
inhabitants' live -in the crater of an extinct
volcano and support themselves, at least in
part, by building boats on the tops of preci-
pices and making drawn-work out of ma-
terials imported from Europe.
As soon as we entered the Caribbean, we
began to look for signs of volcanic activity ;
THE VOYAGE TO MARTINIQUE
but, with the exception of what seemed to be
an intermittent jet of steam in a bare spot
half-way up the steep western slope of Saba,
we saw nothing to indicate that there was a
volcano within a thousand miles. The
second great eruption of Mont Pelee was in
progress when I went on deck that very
morning, and the detonations that accom-
panied it were certainly heard at Guadeloupe,
and were probably audible at St. Kitts and
Santa Cruz ; but we did not notice any un-
. usual sounds, nor could we see the faintest
indication of volcanic dust in the air. The
sea was tranquil and the atmosphere clear all
day, as we steamed southward past Saba, St.
Kitts, Montserrat, and Gaudeloupe; and
when the " Volcanco Volunteers " climbed
into their hammocks on the after berth-deck
of the Dixie at eleven o'clock that night,
there was a general feeling of disappointment,
due to a fear that Mont Pelee had lapsed
into quiescence and that we should arrive too
late to see anything like a spectacular erup-
tion.
We expected to make the northwestern
coast of Martinique before daylight Wednes-
15
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
day morning, and at four o'clock a few of us
were on deck watching eagerly for the first in-
dication of volcanic activity. It was a clear,
warm, starry night, and by the light of a
nearly full moon, which was just setting, we
could dimly make out ahead the faint shad-
owy outline of a high, beautifully sculptured
peak which we took at first sight to be Pelee.
Mr. Hill, however, who had visited Martin-
ique before and was more familiar than the
rest of us with the topography of the island,
soon identified it as one of the peaks of the
Carbet group, situated just south of Pelee.
The volcano itself, as we soon discovered,
was hidden from base to summit in a mantle
of dark vapor, above which, against the starry
sky, rose to a height of two or three thou-
sand feet, a huge column of steam which
looked in the moonlight like one of the piled-
up cumulus clouds locally known in the
Middle West as " thunderheads."
Near the line where the black mantle of
Pelee met the sea, there were two glowing
fires, which we thought, at first, might be
cremation fires in the wrecked city of St.
Pierre, and a little farther to the northward
i6
THE VOYAGE TO MARTINIQUE
three or four twinkling lights marked the site
of Precheur. With these exceptions the
whole coast was dark. As the yellowish
moon sank lower and lower in the west and
the sky began to brighten behind the cloud-
capped peaks of Carbet, we ran in at a sharp
angle toward the harbor of Fort de France
until the fires of St. Pierre and the great
mantle of dark vapor that hid the outline of
Pelee vanished behind one of the high but-
tresses of the mountainous coast. We could
still see, however, the column of steam rising
from the volcano's crater and slowly piling
itself up in vast convolutions above the light
trade-wind clouds which drifted westward
across the island.
Between six and seven o'clock the Dixie
steamed slowly into the harbor of Fort de
France, where we found lying at anchor the
Cincinnati, the Potomac, the French cruiser
Suchet, the repair-steamer of the French
Cable Company, and three or four other ves-
sels. An officer from the Cincinnati soon came
alongside in a steam-launch, and shouted to
Captain Berry that he had a telegram for him
from Washington, and that the Dixie would
17
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
probably have to go at once to St. Vincent,
where the suffering and destitution were
worse, and the need of relief greater, than in
any part of Martinique.
The newspaper men and scientists there-
upon held consultations, in all parts of the
ship, with regard to the best course of pro-
cedure. Should they go to St. Vincent with
Captain Berry, or land at Fort de France
and take the chance of being picked up by
the Dixie on her return trip ? Most of them
decided in favor of St. Vincent, but Mr. Jac-
caci, Mr. Varian, and I concluded to remain
in Martinique and make as careful a study as
possible of St. Pierre and Mont Pelee. We
landed, therefore, in one of the ship's boats,
soon after breakfast ; made the acquaintance
of Mr. Ay me. United States Consul at
Pointe a Pitre, Guadeloupe, who was then act-
ing as Consul in Martinique; and with his as-
sistance succeeded in getting rooms in the
Grand European Hotel, a three-story build-
ing fronting on the Savane, or public square,
near the piers. After discussing the situa-
tion and exchanging itelms of news with Mr.
Ayme, Mr. Jaccaci and I went out to take
i8
THE VOYAGE TO MARTINIQUE
a walk, buy a few things that we wanted,
and inspect the city.
Fort de France, the capital of Martinique,
is a town of about 16,000 inhabitants, and is
situated on the northern side of the bay of the
same name, under the shelter of rather high,
rounded hills. As seen from the water, it is
a compact mass of red roofs and dark-green
foliage, standing on very low, flat ground,
between the mouth of the Riviere Madame
and the massive gray walls of an ancient and
apparently dismantled fort. Its buildings,
which are generally two or three stories in
height, are made of kalsomined brick, or
rubble masonry covered with stucco ; its
streets, although narrow, are clean and well-
paved ; little streams of clear water from the
hills run constantly through the open gut-
ters ; and the Savane, or public square, which
borders the sea just north of the fort, is a
fine, grassy park 1,000 feet long and 600 feet
in width, intersected by walks and shaded by
sandbox trees, tamarinds and royal palms. A
large, well-ventilated iron building, about
midway between the Grand Hotel and the
Riviere Madame, shelters the central market ;
>9
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
there is a good public library in a large
house fronting on the Savane ; the marble
statue of the Empress Josephine, which
stands in a circle of royal palms near the
centre of the park, is a really creditable work
of art ; and at the head of one of the princi-
pal streets, just north of the Riviere Ma-
dame, the Fontaine de Gueydon rushes out
of the arched mouth of a big stone aqueduct
on the summit of a steep hillj falls in a thin,
silvery sheet to a circular basin below, and
then runs in a dozen little streams through
the city.
The population of Fort de France, as
seen on the water front and in the main
streets, is made up almost wholly of negroes,
mulattoes, quadroons, and ethnological hy-
brids of one sort or another, whose complex-
ions range from the pure black of the un-
modified African to the swarthy white of the
French octoroon and the rather delicate red-
dish-brown of the " capresse." All the women
wear turbans made of bright-colored bandanna
kerchiefs ; most of the men go bare-footed ;
and at least two persons out of every five
carry loads on their heads in baskets, bundles
20
^t'
.^^:^«^v
THE VOYAGE TO MARTINIQUE
or shallow wooden trays. Here and there
we met a French gentleman in white duck
clothes and pith helmet, going down to the
pier ; two or three young naval officers in
uniform who had just come ashore from
the cruiser Suchet ; or a lady in light
European dress on her way to church ; but
four-fifths of the people whom we saw on
the streets were either black or of mixed
blood. They seemed, however, to be talk-
ative, good-humored, courteous and fairly
intelligent, and made upon me, generally, a
more favorable impression than that made
by the common people of Spanish-African
descent in Cuba.
The favorite place of resort for the French-
men of the town seemed to be the open
kiosk at the edge of the Savane in front of
our hotel. There, gentlemen of leisure and
white-uniformed officers from the Suchet
assembled every afternoon and evening to
play cards, smoke cigarettes, talk about the
volcano, and sip queer West Indian drinks.
I thought I was familiar with most of the
cooling, heating, refreshing and inebriating
beverages known to civilized man ; but the
21
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
waiters of Bediat's Hotel, who answered
calls from tables in the kiosk, compounded
in a big glass cylinder and mixed by means
of a perforated piston a drink that I wholly
failed to recognize. It looked like choco-
late, churned into a foam by working a
piston up and down through it in a glass
garden-syringe. Upon making inquiries, I
learned that it was a cocktail ! As I had
never seen a cocktail made in that way, and
as I was hot and tired from walking about
the town, I ventured to order one. I don't
know of what ingredients that chocolate-
colored beverage was composed ; but I de-
cided, after tasting it, that I should make
no more experiments with drinks mixed in
a glass hand-churn, and that a plain lemon-
ade with a straw in it would thenceforth
meet all my wants.
But the Grand Hotel de Bediat was as
queer as the drinks that are furnished. Break-
fast, or luncheon, was served at 1 1 a. m.
Negro waiters, who wore nothing but shirts and
trousers, brought food to the guests at small
tables, and put more food, for the dogs of the
guests, into plates on the floor. The dogs
22
THE VOYAGE TO MARTINIQUE
and cats of the hotel, who were apparently
familiar with this custom, endeavored to get
a share of the food furnished to the guest-
dogs, and the result was a general and prom-
iscuous scrimmage, which, with the joyous
crowing of three or four big roosters in a wire
coop just off the dining-room, furnished, in
a simple form, all the comforts of home,
which were charged as extras in the bill. I
was told by Mr. Ayme that none of the ex-
plosions of Mont Pelee were heard in this
hotel. If they occurred at meal-time, the fact
is not surprising. Mr. Bediat's combination
of dogs, cats and roosters would have
drowned Krakatoa. Dinner, which was usu-
ally served at 7 p. m., was a more quiet and
ceremonious function, owing to the fact that
the roosters had gone to roost and were not
yet ready to begin crowing for morning, and
the guests with dogs happened to be dining
somewhere else. The table d'hote dinner
consisted of soup made out of warm water and
toast ; fish brought from the Grand Banks in
a sailing vessel, which, unfortunately, had no
cold-storage facilities ; a dismembered rooster,
dried over a charcoal-brazier after advancing
»3
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
age had rendered him incapable of crowing in
the hotel coop ; green peas cooked in oil ;
ice cream flavored with bergamot and served
in brandy-glasses ; cheese, coflPee and tooth-
picks. The cheese and the coflTee were good ;
and after I had gone to my room and mixed
for myself a stiflF drink of malted milk and
Vichy water, I felt quite strengthened and re-
freshed by the dinner. Mr. Ayme, however,
who had an inherited objection to fish that
was more than six weeks old, rebelled at the
second course, summoned the proprietor and
filed a protest ; but Mr. Bediat called all the
saints of Martinique to bear witness that the
fish had not been brought from the Grand
Banks in a dismasted schooner, but had been
carefully selected by a District Messenger
boy, aged six, in the local market. He ad-
mitted, however, that the second course was
a little weak, and promised to make a suita-
ble abatement in the price of the dinner.
Then, when we had a guest at breakfast
^the next morning, he covered the loss on the
fish by charging the guest's breakfast in three
separate accounts — Mr. Ayme's, Mr. Jac-
caci's and mine. Mr. Ayme was probably too
24
THE VOYAGE TO MARTINIQUE
fastidious, and too much inclined to give a
free rein to his appetite ; and if he had beet
living elsewhere, he might have become cor-
pulent and sluggish. It is a great mistake to
eat too much in a hot climate ; and for that
reason I can confidently recommend the
Grand European Hotel at Fort de France as
a place where a northern man may hope to
escape the disastrous consequences of intensive
nutrition in a tropical environment. If he
lives prudently, and doesn't have the misfor-
tune to get overheated when Mr. Bediat pre-
sents his bill, he will never die of apoplexy
in Martinique.
Mr. Jaccaci and I spent most of Wednes-
day afternoon in getting statements of personal
experience from sailorsof the steamer Roraima
and other survivors of the St. Pierre catas-
trophe, who were then recovering from their
frightful burns in the Military Hospital.
Thursday we made a hasty trip to St.
Pierre on the United States tug Potomac,
and, after examining the desolate, gashed,
furrowed, steam-rent slope of the volcano on
that side, decided to adopt a plan suggested
by Mr. Jaccaci, which was to proceed north- /
as
THE TRAGEDY OF PELJ&E
ward by way of the eastern coast, and attack
the volcano from the windward side.
There seemed to be no reasonably safe
base of operations on the St. Pierre slope, but
by establishing our headquarters at some
sugar plantation near the foot of Pelee on the
opposite side we could probably reach Morne
Rouge, which was only three miles south of
the main crater, and from there it might be
practicable to make an ascent. At any rate,
we should escape the smoke and suffocating
vapor that rolled at intervals down the hot
mud-fields between St. Pierre and Precheur,
and the showers of ashes that the steady trade-
wind carried westward over the Caribbean
coast.
At eleven o'clock Thursday night Mr. Jac-
caci came to my room to tell me that horses
had been ordered for 5 a. m., and that as soon
as possible thereafter we should start for the
volcano by way of Trinite, Marigot, and
Grande Anse.
\
26
II
our ride to mont
pel£e
ALTHOUGH the servants in Bediat's
Hotel had been strictly enjoined
to get us up at four o'clock, and a
carriage with a span of mules had been ordered
forfive,we were allowed to sleep peacefully un-
til a quarter of six, when the increasing light
andthecrowing of cocks in the hotel courtyard
made it impossible for anyone but a native to
sleep longer. From the point of view of the
proprietor it was unreasonable, of course, to
order or expect breakfast in a Martinique ho-
tel at 6 A. M. The servants did not begin to
clear the tables in the dining-room and wash
the dishes left there from the previous night's
dinner until seven, and the regular hour for
breakfast was eleven. We proceeded, there-
27
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
fore, to get breakfast for ourselves on a bare,
dirty table in the bar-room. We had taken
the precaution to bring a small quantity of
elementary nutriment ashore with us from
the Dixie ; and as we munched dry hardtack
and drank malted milk mixed with Vichy water
over that dirty bar-room table, we felt as if
we had reason to congratulate ourselves upon
our prevision, if not our provision. Hardtack
and slab-chocolate, eaten in alternate bites
and washed down with a mixture of malted-
milk powder and tepid Vichy water, make a
fine, wholesome breakfast — for the tropics.
After breakfast, Mr. Jaccaci had to go in
search of the carriage and mules, and from
the volcanic expression of his face when he
left the bar-room I felt sure that the tardy
driver would shortly be overwhelmed by a
verbal eruption in several languages — and he
was ! We got under way at last, and rolling
past the Savane, with its mango-trees, tama-
rinds and palm-encircled statue of Josephine,
we began the ascent of the long, flower-fringed
foad which leads up to Fort Desaix, and thence,
across mountains and vallevs innumerable, to
the eastern coast of the island at Trinite.
28
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
the villas that stood behind these hedges and
gardens we could see little or nothing. They
were buried in masses of foliage and bloom.
As we passed the gate of Fort Desaix,
near the top of the hill, we met a squad of
French buglers, who were marching slowly
and solemnly around the outside of the fort,
tooting in unison what I presumed to be the
Martinique reveille.
Emerging at last from the narrow, wind-
ing, flower-bordered road and reaching the
crest of the great divide that separates the
Riviere Monsieur from the Riviere Madame^
we looked out over a wonderfully beautiful
panorama of wooded foothills, deep misty
valleys, sunlit plains, and shimmering water,
that seemed to extend from the cloud-capped
peaks of Carbet on the north to the low
purple mountains that bound the Bay of Fort
de France on the south. An extensive tract
of level land, covered with sugar-cane, could
be seen near the head of the bay, but every-
where else the island was a billowy sea of
mountains, with here and there the glimmer
of a stream, a few patchwork squares of culti-
vation, or a cluster of red-roofed houses to
30
THE RIDE TO MONT PEL^E
light up the deep, shadowy valleys or break
the dark green masses of foliage on the
forested slopes. Over the crests of these huge
green mountain billows and down into the
valleys that separated them ran the white
macadamized road in a series of long loops
and curves, now sweeping in deep shadow
around the head of a wild ravine and crossing
a foaming torrent on a stone bridge, then
climbing a long, smooth grade to the crest of
a sunny divide, then plunging into a dark
valley where the horizon-line was a silhouette
of palms against the sky a thousand feet
overhead, and finally doubling on itself in a
narrow horseshoe curve and ascending to a
breezy morney or dome-shaped mound, from
which we could see the ocean, the bay, and
almost the whole southern half of the island.
The road was so sinuous, and changed direc-
tion so rapidly, that even with the aid of the
sun and the steady trade-wind it was almost
impossible to keep ourselves accurately ori-
ented. In the course of a short half-hour
that road would run north, south, east and
west by turns ; and when, upon coming up
out of a deep ravine, we looked ahead for the
31
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
peaks of Carbet, we were sure to find our-
selves facing in the opposite direction, with
the peaks at our backs. Two or three times
at least I mistook the Bay of Fort de France
for the ocean on the other side of the island,
and prominent landmarks seemed to be con-
stantly shifting from place to place, as if some
superhuman power rearranged them every
time we went down into a deep valley and
lost sight of them. The highways in Mar-
tinique are almost as smooth and perfect as
roads can be made; but their loops and
curves are as eccentric as the tracings of a
seismograph in a Lisbon earthquake.
An hour and a half from Fort de France
we passed at a short distance the picturesque
village of St. Joseph ; two hours later we
watered our mules in a little hamlet half-way
across the island ; and just before noon,
from the eastern slope of a great mountain
dome known as Gros Morne, we caught sight
of the Atlantic.
After leaving the Gros Morne we began
to meet long lines of women and girls carry-
ing roofing-tiles from Trinite to a sugar plan-
tation a few miles back in the interior, and
3a
OUR RIDE TO MONT PELJ&E
had an opportunity to see what the " porte-
uses " of Martinique are like, and what they
are able to do and endure in the blazing sun-
shine of the tropics. Freight of all sorts is
carried and distributed throughout the in-
terior of Martinique by women and young
girls. Ox-carts are used for the transporta-
tion of cane from the fields to the sugar-mills,
and little donkeys bring into the villages
sacks of charcoal, or loads of green forage
that are big enough sometimes to hide them
completely from sight ; but all kinds of mer-
chandise, including dry goods, groceries,
hardware, kerosene, farm products, and even
such things as building-stones, bricks, cement,
and roofing-tiles, are carried from place to
place on the heads of women and girls. I
cannot remember to have seen, at any time
or in any part of the island, a pack-train of
mules, or a wagon or cart of any kind loaded
with freight ; but you cannot go a mile on
any country road without meeting at least one
line of straight, vigorous, barefooted women,
walking swiftly, with a long, free, swaying
stride, and balancing without effort on their
heads loads weighing from fifty to eighty
33
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
pounds. If we three travelers could have
had ourselves divided and made into six
packages, I am perfectly sure that six of those
women might have carried us in wooden trays
on their heads from Fort de France to Trin-
ite much more rapidly than we were drawn
over that distance by a span of able-bodied
mules, and that they would have shown less
fatigue and distress than the mules did upon
arrival. The colored women of Martinique
are not attractive, as a rule, in feature ; but
the habit of carrying heavy loads, for hours
at a time, on their heads has given them
superb erectness and grace of figure, together
with an elasticity of step and a freedom of
movement that I have never seen equaled.
As we left the Gros Morne and went down
toward the seacoast in the direction of Trinite,
there was a complete change in the scenery
and vegetation. The mountains gradually
became lower ; cocoanut palms, bananas, bam-
boos, and other distinctively tropical trees and
shrubs disappeared altogether ; vast fields of
young cane, which, at a distance, looked like
green grass, clothed the slopes of the hills ;
the few trees that remained stood here and
34
OirrUHE MAP OF MARTINiqpE
OUR RIDE TO MONT PELfiE
there in groups or ran in straight lines through
the sugar plantations ; and the scenery, in
general, suggested the north temperate zone.
We reached Trinite about i p. m., and
drove to the " Hotel des Voyageurs " —
a queer place kept by a Frenchified Yankee,
forty-five or fifty years of age, named Frost.
Mr. Frost wore iron-rimmed spectacles and
looked and dressed like a New England
deacon ; but he could not speak his father's
language, and had married a corpulent negro
woman, who managed, apparently, both the
hotel and its nominal proprietor.
After refreshing ourselves with a good
lunch, we obtained fresh mules and started
northward, up the eastern coast of the island,
toward the plantation of Vive — a sugar es-
tate at the foot of the volcano, owned by a
wealthy French planter named Fernand
Clerc. Mr. Clerc had not invited us to make
him a visit; but as it was absolutely neces-
sary that we should stay somewhere in the
vicinity of the mountain, and, as we could not
hear of any "Volcano Hotel" in that neigh-
borhood, we intended to throw ourselves upon
Mr. Clerc's hospitality and take the conse-
37
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfeE
quences. I felt some misgivings with regard
to the reception that we should get — espe-
cially if we should arrive late at night — but
Mr. Jaccaci seemed hopeful and confident,
and as he would have to do all the talking
and explaining, I was satisfied to leave the
matter in his hands.
Up to the time of our arrival at Trinite,
we had seen little or nothing to suggest the
proximity of an active volcano. I had picked
up a few small black volcanic stones on the
balcony of Bediat's Hotel, and a thin film of
bluish-gray ashes covered undisturbed parts
of the road between Fort de France and
St. Joseph ; but the vegetation everywhere
looked fresh and green ; there was no smoke
or dust in the air; the country people
seemed to be attending to their work and
going about their business as usual ; Mont
Pelee was hidden most of the time behind the
peaks and mornes of Carbet ; and there was
absolutely nothing to suggest danger or ex-
cite apprehension. Beyond Trinite, however,
all this was changed. From the crests of the
long, sloping mountain buttresses that the
road crossed as it followed northward the
38
OUR RIDE TO MONT PEL£E
sweeping curves of the surf-beaten coast, we
could see the black mantle of storm-clouds in
which the volcano was wrapped and the huge
column of steam that rose into the clearer air
above it. The film of ashes on the road
grew thicker and thicker, and the leaves of
the trees were covered with a gray deposit
which looked like finely powdered Portland
cement and that had been sifted over the foli-
age after a rain and had then dried. Beyond
Marigot the volcanic dust lay two inches deep
on the road, and the trees — especially the
breadfruit trees — had been so plastered with
wet, clinging ashes that limbs three or four
inches in thickness had been broken by the
weight. In certain parts of the road the country
looked almost as desolate as if it had been
swept by a sleet-storm of Portland cement,
which had poisoned the foliage, broken down
the branches of the trees, and covered the
whole earth with a thin sheet of fine grayish
powder.
After leaving Marigot we began to meet
long lines of men, women and children flying
from the volcano, with their household goods
and furniture on their heads. The great
39
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
eruption of May 20 and the threatening ap-
pearance of the volcano on the two subse-
quent days had frightened the whole popula-
tion in the northern part of the island, and
hundredsof fugitives from Vive, Basse Pointe,
Macouba, Morne Rouge, and Ajoupa Bouil-
lon were streaming along the road to Trinite,
carrying on their heads everything that it was
possible to carry from their abandoned
homes. Every member of a family, from the
father to the youngest child that could walk,
had a load of some sort. The man of the
house usually marched in front, leading a cow
or a goat, and balancing on his head a cheap
yellow trunk. Then came the wife and
mother, carrying a baby on one arm, and
steadying with the other a big inverted
kitchen table, the bottom of which she had
filled with pots, pans and dishes. The old-
est boy carried a wooden trayful of yams,
mangoes, caladium roots, and two-tailed,
loaves of bread ; his sister followed in his foot-
steps with a handkerchief bundle of clothing
crowned with a big straw hat ; and last of all
tottled a five-year-old girl holding a chicken
by the wings in one hand and cuddling to
40
/
*• .;^
THE NEW YORK
'DBUC library)
OUR RIDE TO MONT PEL£E
her breast with the other a small, fluffy gray
kitten.
It was curious and interesting to see what
things different families had selected and
brought away from their abandoned homes.
Some were carrying pillows and mattresses
tied up with ropes, while others preferred food
to bedding, and were loaded down with bread,
mangoes, and edible roots. Some had pro-
vided themselves with extra clothing wrapped
in big bandanna handkerchiefs, others had left
their spare clothing behind and brought away
furniture. One woman was carrying three
or foui- chickens in a wide-mouthed earthen-
ware pot ; another had on her head a large
razor-backed pig, lashed securely with raw-
hide thongs in a shallow wooden tray. I pre-
sume the pig refused to be led or driven
away from the volcano, and the woman was
forced to carry him. When we saw him, he
had given up the struggle as hopeless, and
had even stopped squealing ; but his fiery lit-
tle eyes had an expression of wrathful pro-
test, and if he had been able to increase his
weight to half a ton, I am quite sure he would
have done so. It was really too humiliating,
41
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
even for a pig, to be lashed in a wooden tray
and "toted" away from a volcano on a
woman's head !
When we passed through Grande Anse,
late in the afternoon, the long street running
parallel with the sea was crowded with fugi-
tives ; an immense throng of turbaned wom-
en and children, in scarlet, purple, lilac,
magenta, green, black, and dirty white calico
gowns, had assembled in front of the "mairie,"
where food was being distributed by the mu-
nicipal authorities, and the shrill clamor of
excited voices could be heard a quarter of a
mile away. The whole crowd stared at us
with curiosity and surprise when they saw
that we were going on in the direction from
which they had just come, and one woman
exclaimed, as she pointed at us with out-
stretched arm, " Look at the poor unfortu-
nates — going toward the mountain ! " She
evidently thought that no sane man would
approach the volcano unless forced to do so
by dire necessity ; and she regarded us with
sympathy and pity as persons compelled by
some imperative duty to take desperate
chances of life and death.
4*
OUR RIDE TO MONT PEL^E
Night overtook us between Grande Anse
and Vive, and it grew so dark that we could
hardly see the outlines of the road ; but still
the long line of fugitives passed us, like a
procession of shadowy ghosts, never speak-
ing, never making the least noise, and never
stopping except to whisper a prayer in front
of some candle-lighted roadside shrine. They
were flying in terror from a Vision of Sudden
Death, and they fled in perfect silence. In
some vague, indefinite way, this shadowy,
noiseless procession of fugitives, hurrying
from the volcano in the blackness of night,
made a certain impression on us all ; but it
was impossible, nevertheless, to realize that
there was any adequate cause for the panic.
" These poor ignorant negroes," I said to
myself, " don't know anything about volca-
noes, and of course when ashes begin to sift
down on them they get frightened and run
away, although there's really very little dan-
ger." That we, ourselves, might get fright-
ened and run away was a possibility that
never once occurred to me ; and if I had
happened to experience suddenly then the
feeling of nervous dread with which that
43
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfeE
infernal volcano eventually inspired me, I
should certainly have thought that I must
be ill, and should have proceeded to dose
myself with quinine, strychnine, and iron.
Our tired mules were going very slowly
and could hardly be lashed into a trot
even on the descending slopes, when, about
eight o'clock our attention was attracted by
a bright light which suddenly appeared on
the other side of a gulf of blackness that we
took to be an intervening valley. When we
reached the spot we found that the light
came from a wayside shrine, where, behind
a little glass door, two or three candles were
burning in front of a small plaster crucifix.
A group of fugitives had gathered about it,
and when we asked one of them how far it
was to the house of Mr. Clerc, he replied,
" It is here."
Driving through a long avenue shaded by
large mango-trees and bordered by dense
hedges, we drew up at last before the spa-
cious mansion of the Vive sugar estate. Mr.
Clerc — a good-looking, frank-faced gentle-
man about forty years of age — came out
with a lighted candle to meet us, gave us a
44
OUR RIDE TO MONT PEL£E
most cordial greeting, said that he had heard
of our coming, that our rooms were ready,
and that dinner was waiting. Twenty minutes
later we were all seated around the dining-
table, drinking " cyclone " wine (the vintage
of the Martinique cyclone year) and discuss-
ing that all-absorbing topic of conversation,
the volcano.
The eruption of the 20th, Mr. Clerc
said, had completed the destruction of St.
Pierre, and had thrown thousands of tons of
ashes over the Vive plantation ; but since
that time nothing had happened. A new
crater had opened in the gorge of the river
Falaise, about three miles and a half from
Vive, but its activity had been intermittent,
and it had done nothing so far but send an
occasional flood of boiling water and mud
down into the Capot — the river on which
Vive is situated. Morne Rouge was still
accessible, but, owing to its close proximity
to the main crater, it was regarded as a dan-
gerous place, and most of its inhabitants had
fled. Basse Pointe, a village on the north-
eastern coast, about two miles and a half
from Vive, had just been partially destroyed
45
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
by a sudden flood of mud, water and stones,
but had not yet been wholly abandoned.
Many people had fled from Ajoupa Bouillon,
a village higher up on the volcano than
Vive and nearer to the Falaise crater ; but
the priest and the mayor were still there, and
gendarmes patrolled the road as far as Morne
Rouge.
After a general discussion of the situation,
we decided to begin our study of the volcano
by making an inspection of Basse Point,
where one phase of Pelee's destructive activ-
ity was well shown, and where we could get
an idea, Mr. Clerc said, of the floods of
water, mud and stones that had swept away
the Guerin sugar-mill, destroyed Precheur,
and devastated the whole western slope of
the mountain. If the weather should then
prove to be favorable, we intended to cross
the southeastern flank of Pelee, visit Morne
Rouge, and go down as far as possible in the
track of the scorching hurricane that rushed
across the valley of the Roxelane on the 8th
of May and destroyed the city of St. Pierre.
In this way we should get views of the
volcano from three sides, and see the results
46
OUR RIDE TO MONT PEL£E
of its activity in several widely separated
places.
It was so dark when we went out-of-doors
and looked in the direction of Pelee before
going to bed that night that we could see
little or nothing. The sky was overcast, and
the volcano seemed to be hidden from base
to summit in a black mantle of clouds. Not
a sound could be heard except a faint rush of
water from the river Capot and the regular
pounding of the trade-wind surf on the beach.
Soon after daylight Saturday morning we
were awakened by the ringing of a bell in the
adjacent sugar-mill, and, dressing hastily,
we went out to take a look at the Vive
plantation. Before the rain of ashes from
Pelee began, the estate of Mr. Clerc, with its
mango-trees, blossoming shrubs, scarlet flam-
boyants, hibiscus hedges, vine-draped walls,
climbing roses, gardens and geometrical flow-
er-beds, must have made a striking and beau-
tiful tropical picture. It had the ocean, with
a long line of snowy surf, on one side, and
the high, forest-clad peaks of Carbet and
Pelee on the other ; cool streams from the
hills ran through it ; cane-fields gave it a set-
47
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£e
ting of vivid green ; and between the two-
story house, with its broad shady veranda,
and the avenue of hibiscus-bushes that led
through the grove of mango-trees to the
main road, there was a flower-garden of formal
beds which must once have been a mass of
rich and glowing color. When we first saw
the place, however, everything had been
ruined. The walls of the house looked as if
they had been splashed and spattered with a
mixture of mucilage and Portland cement
which had trickled down in muddy lines and
then dried ; volcanic dust had been shoveled,
like snow, oflT the veranda and lay in heaps
beside the walks; the ground under the
mango-trees was covered with branches
broken from the trunks by the weight of
volcanic sleet ; the flower-beds were buried
in grayish mud which had the appearance
and consistency of half-dried clay ; the vines
were scorched and blackened as if they had
been subjected to a zero frost; nearly half
the leaves had fallen from the breadfruit-trees,
those that still clung to the twigs were so
plastered with the Portland-cement mixture
that they looked withered and half dead ; and
48
\
\
OUR RIDE TO MONT PELfiE
the whole landscape had an appearance of
gray ruin and desolation that it is hard to de-
scribe, and must be even harder for the read-
er to imagine. It is probably not an exag-
geration to say that upon every square mile
of the Vive plantation there had fallen thou-
sands of tons of pulverized rock in the form
of fine, gray, powdery dust — and yet Vive
was five miles from the main crater of the
volcano, and in the outer penumbra of the
deadly shadow cast by its ash-laden clouds.
49
Ill
BASSE POINTE AND
MORNE ROUGE
ON the morning after our arrival at
Vive we had, for the first time, a
clear view of the volcano from the
eastern side, and were able, with the aid of
a field-glass and a fairly good French map,
to get something like a correct idea of its
topography and contour.
Mont Pelee, with its radiating buttresses,
occupies the whole northwestern end of
Martinique, from the river Capot to the
ocean. If a curved line were drawn across
the island from St. Pierre to Vive, in such a
manner as to include the valley of the Qipot,
it would form, with the ocean boundary, a
nearly perfect circle, about ten miles in dia-
meter, with the main crater of the volcano
50
,1
•
.1
BASSE POINTE— MORNE ROUGE
near its centre, and a series of alternating
ridges and valleys radiating on all sides to the
periphery. If this circle were regarded as a
huge wagon wheel, the main crater would oc-
cupy nearly the position of the hub ; the di-
vergent aretes or buttresses would represent
the spokes ; and most of the neighboring
settlements would stand at short intervals
around the rim.
If all the ridges or buttresses were straight,
and if they had a regular and uniform slope
from the main crater to the periphery of the
base, the volcano would have the shape of a
low cone, with a gradient of about one in sixl
Inasmuch, however, as some of these aretes
are very irregular in contour, keeping nearly
if not quite up to the level of the crater for
half a mile or more, and then falling in lines
that are convex rather than concave, the
mountain looks more like a " hog-back"
than a cone. From Vive it has the appear-
ance of a great mountainous ridge, whose
contour^lines are not generally steep, and
whose crest, seen in profile, is a slightly in-
cline plane. From its highest point, which
seems to be north of the main crater, it slopes
51
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
gently southward for three-quarters of a mile,
and then falls rather abruptly to the long,
wavy line of the watershed that separates the
upper Capot from the Riviere des Peres and
the Roxelane.
High up on the volcano, at the heads of
the diverging aretes, rise a dozen or more
streams which tumble down to the sea on all
sides of the mountain, falling very rapidly at
first in deeply eroded gorges, shaggy with
tropical vegetation, and then flowing more
slowly through open valleys whose slopes
are covered with a green carpet of young
sugar-cane.
About a mile and a half east of the main
crater, in the gorge of the wild mountain
torrent known as the Falaise, there is an in-
termittent sub-crater, which throws out at
intervals clouds of steam more or less
densely charged with dust, and in the gorge
of the Riviere Blanche, on the southwestern
slope of the mountain, there is a second
vent, which seems to be connected with the
main crater by a long fissure, and which is a
more dangerous opening, perhaps, than
either of the others.
5*
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
deep with compacted ashes, through which
wrinkle-like furrows had been out by down-
rushing water ; the upper slopes, near the
central part of the crest, were strewn with
stones, boulders, and volcanic bombs; the
northern end of the ridge was almost as white
as if soda or salt had been sifted over it ; and
above the main crater stood a great pillar of
cloud a thousand feet in height, which bent
a little to leeward with the steady trade-wind,
and dropped a dark, rain-like shower of ashes
over the village of Precheur. The whole
mountain looked bare, desolate, and threat-
ening.
We spent most of our first day at Vive
indoors. The sky after breakfast became
overcast ; heavy storm-clouds gathered about
the summit of the volcano ; and the weather
looked so unpromising that we decided not to
attempt anything more difficult than a short
drive to the village of Basse Pointe, which
had just been deluged, and partly destroyed,
by a flood of water and mud which rushed
down upon it suddenly from the volcano.
Mr. Clerc volunteered to accompany us in
the capacity of driver and guide ; mules and
54
*
r
BASSE POINTE— MORNE ROUGE
a light two-seated carriage were ordered, and
in half an hour we were sweeping around the
curves of the hard, beautifully kept road
which skirts the surf-beaten coast from Trinite
to Grande Riviere.
Groups and files of fugitives from the
northern villages began to pass us as soon as
we came out upon the highway. Barefooted,
bareheaded negroes in dirty cotton shirts and
drawers were driving southward unyoked
oxen with coils of heavy iron chain around
their horns ; women who had pinned bright-
colored paper pictures of the Virgin Mary
over their hearts to protect them from the
volcano, but who seemed to have more faith
in their own legs than in the Madonna,
passed us from time to time with headloads
of furniture, kitchen utensils, bedding, or
food ; children trotted soberly behind their
parents with wooden trays of fruit on their
heads, or pet chickens, kittens, or puppies
in their arms ; and now and then a mounted
planter in helmet and white duck rode past
on his way to Trinite or Fort de France.
All were endeavoring, apparently, to get out
of range of a volcano that had shown its
55
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
ability and readiness to kill at a distance of
five miles with stones, mud, fire, lightning,
steam, ashes, and floods.
When we reached Basse Pointe and saw
the destruction that had been wrought by the
flood of water and the semi-liquid avalanche
of mud and boulders that had rushed down
the stream on which the village is situated,
we felt more inclined than ever to sympathize
with the fugitives and to excuse even the
weak faith of the women with the paper pic-
tures of the Madonna pinned over their
hearts. Nobody could be expected to live in
the shadow of a mountain that might at any
moment let loose, somewhere up in the
clouds, a Johnstown flood of mud and water
loaded with ten-ton masses of volcanic rock.
Where the torrent came from that swept
through Basse Pointe I do not know ; but it
carried away trees and houses, strewed the
bed of the stream with enormous boulders
torn out of the side of the volcano, and left
in the lower stories of the houses that it did
not carry away a deposit of soft grayish mud
four or five feet deep.
After Mont Pelee began to show signs of
56
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
a volcano as hot as Mont Pelee. If the water
got into the mountain at or below the sea-
level, it would have to be lifted to heights of
from 2,000 to 4,000 feet before it could flow
out of the craters, and, meanwhile, it would
probably be converted into steam by the in-
tense heat of the containing walls and of the
molten or incandescent rock at the base of
the chimney. There might happen to be
subterranean reservoirs of water in the in-
terior of the volcano, or in the earth under
it, and they might be disrupted by volcanic
action ; but it is not probable that the num-
ber of such reservoirs would equal the num-
ber of floods that have occurred on the slopes
of Mont Pelee since the volcano became ac-
tive. It seems to me more reasonable, there-
fore, on the whole, to suppose that the floods
originate outside the craters and are due to
cloud-bursts and extraordinary rainfalls.
Tropical storms that have no connection
whatever with volcanoes, and that, from a
meteorological point of view, are perfectly
normal, often cause tremendous floods in nar-
row valleys that happen to lie between ex-
tensive watersheds, and if to the natural down-
58
BASSE POINTE — MORNE ROUGE
pour o^ such a storm were added the pre-
cipitation due to rapid condensation of im-
mense volumes of steam from the crater of
the volcano, the result might be a sudden
deluge that would sweep thousands of tons
of ashes off the slopes of the watershed, tear
hundreds of old volcanic boulders out of the
loosely compacted, cindery sides of the moun-
tain, and then rush down the nearest drain-
age-channel like a huge tidal wave of liquid
mud and stones, carrying everything be-
fore it
The objections made by the natives to this
explanation of the disasters at Precheur and
Basse Pointe are, first, that the floods were
not preceded nor accompanied by great
storms : second, that storms severe enough to
produce such eflFects were unknown before
the volcano became active ; and, third, that a
storm due to general meteorological conditions
would aflfect the whole mountain and not
merely a single gorge or valley on one side
of it.
It is quite possible, however, that there
may be cloud-bursts, or heavy rain, on the
summit without any general storm. The
59
THE TRAGEDY OF PELJ&E
were falling all along the line of the coast
from St. Pierre to Precheur. An occasional
detonation could be heard in the direction of
the mountain, but there was no other sign or
forewarning of the impending catastrophe.
About eight o'clock, with a rending, roaring
sound, a great cloud of black smoke appeared
suddenly on the southwestern face of the vol-
cano near its summit, and rushed swiftly
down in the direction of St. Pierre as if it
were smoke from the discharge of a colossal
piece of artillery. There was no sharp,
thunderous explosion when the cloud ap-
peared, nor was it preceded or followed by an
outburst of flame ; but as it rolled like a
great torrent of black fog down the mountain
slope there was a continuous roar of half-
blended staccato beats of varying intensity,
something like the throbbing, pulsating roar
of a Gatling-gun battery going into action.
The time occupied by the descent of this vol-
canic tornado-cloud was not more, Mr. Clerc
thinks, than two or three minutes ; and if so,
it moved with a velocity of between ninety
and a hundred and thirty-five miles an hour.
It struck the western end of Mont Parnasse
62
BASSE POINTE — MORNE ROUGE
about half a mile from the place where Mr.
Clerc was standing; swept directly over St.
Pierre, wrecking and setting fire to the build-
ings as it passed, and then went diagonally
out to sea, scorching the cocoanut palms and
touching with an invisible torch a few inflam-
mable houses at the extreme northern end of
the village of Carbet.
It began almost immediately to grow dark
— probably as a result of the mushrooming
out of the immense, ash-laden column of
vapor thrown heavenward from the main
crater — ^and in ten or fifteen minutes the only
light to be seen was a faint glow that came
through the falling ashes from the burning
ruins of St. Pierre. It was so dark that Mr.
Clerc could make sure of the presence and
safety of his wife and children only by groping
for them and touching them with his hands.
He could not see even the outlines of their
figures. In twenty minutes or half an hour,
a little light began to filter through the
inky canopy of volcanic dust overhead, and it
became possible to move about ; but the land-
scape was still obscured by falling ashes mixed
with rain, and Mount Pelee had wrapped it-
63
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
self from base to summit in a black mantle
of vapor. Appalled by the frightful volcanic
hurricane, the Egyptian darkness, the glow
of the burning city, and the mystery of the
whole terrible catastrophe, Mr. Clerc fled
with his family and friends to a place of
greater safety in the interior of the country.
At the earliest opportunity he sent his wife
and children to one of the neighboring islands
— I think Guadeloupe — ^visited the ruins of
St. Pierre, where many of his relatives and
nearly all his dearest friends lay buried under
thousands of tons of stones from shattered
walls, and finally returned alone to his ash-
powdered plantation at Vive.
That Mr. Clerc was naturally a man of
great courage appears not only from the fact
that, after such an experience, he returned to
his estate, which was well within the zone of
danger, but from the further fact that, with
his overseer, Mr. Chancel, he climbed Mont
Pelee to the dry bed of the old crater-lake,
and ascertained the location of the new sum-
mit-fissure through which the volcano was
then discharging. He regarded his own res-
idence, however, as a dangerous place to
64
BASSE POINTE— MORNE ROUGE
stay at night, on account of the lowness of its
situation, the proximity of the Falaise crater,
and the possibility that a volcanic deluge
from that part of the mountain might sweep
down the valley of the Capot and overwhelm
his house, just as the torrent of boiling water
and mud overwhelmed the sugar-mill of
Guerin in the valley of the Riviere Blanche,
He, therefore, went every night to sleep in
the house of a friend about two miles away,
at the end of a high spur thrown out to the
northward from the Carbet peaks. He had
once saved himself, his wife, and his children
by taking to the hills ; and his escape on
that occasion was too recent to have been
forgotten. His housekeeper. Mademoiselle
Marie — a gentlewoman of dauntless intrepid-
ity — his overseer, Mr. Chancel, and all the
servants of the household, remained with us
at Vive.
When Mr. Clerc bade us good-night on
Saturday, it was understood that if the
weather should prove favorable we would all
drive the next day over the southeastern
flank of Mont Pelee to Morne Rouge, and
then go as far as possible down the track of
65
THE TRAGEDY OF PELJ&E
the volcanic hurricane which swept across the
road near the Grande Reduit on its way to
St. Pierre.
Sunday morning dawned clear ; the vol-
cano seemed to be quiescent, and at seven
o'clock we started in two carriages for Morne
Rouge. The road ran for a short distance
along the right bank of the Capot, crossed
the gray, muddy stream on a stone bridge,
and then wound upward over gentle slopes,
covered with uncut sugar-cane, toward the
village of Ajoupa Bouillon. The scenery
did not begin to be really mountainous in
character until we reached the Riviere Falaise,
which comes down to the Capot through a
deep, wild gorge bounded by the high aretes
known as the Calebasse and the Morne
Balais. From the bridge over this stream
we ascended steadily through the half-deserted
village of Ajoupa Bouillon to a height of
eight hundred or one thousand feet, and
then began to go around the mountain, across
an interminable series of gorges and aretes
which run steeply down the Calebasse water-
shed to the Capot. The scenery in this part
of the route was splendidly wild and pictur-
66
BASSE POINTE — MORNE ROUGE
esque, the road running back and forth in long,
narrow, horseshoe curves around the heads of
profoundly deep ravines, which were filled
with palms, arborescent ferns, wild bananas,
delicate plumes of bamboo, breadfruit-trees
hung with lianas and festooned with vines,
and a tropical undergrowth of almost in-
describable luxuriance. Everything, how-
ever, seemed to have been scorched and
withered by the hot breath of the volcano.
The vines were almost bare ; the blackened
fronds of the tree-ferns hung limp and lifeless
from their slender trunks; the road was
strewn with the big, withered leaves of the
breadfruit-trees ; the broad, ragged foliage of
the bananas had turned brown ; and the lux-
uriant undergrowth had been plastered,
broken, and beaten down by a heavy sleet-
storm of volcanic ashes. Almost all of the
foliage from which the ashes had been washed
by rain looked brown or black, as if it had
been scorched by fire or nipped by a zero
frost.
Half or three-quarters of a mile from
Morne Rouge we emerged from the dense
tropical forest that covers the middle slopes
67
THE TRAGEDY OF PELJ&E
of the volcano on the southeastern side, and
ten minutes later drove up past a life-sized
crucifix on the high, breezy divide that separ-
ates the Atlantic watershed from that of the
Caribbean. From this point of view we could
see the flat blue plain of the ocean from St.
Pierre almost to Precheur, with the smoking
crater and ash-whitened aretes of Mont
Pelee at our right, the steep forest-clad peaks
of Carbet on our left, and the spire of the
Morne Rouge church in the near foreground,
directly ahead.
Driving through a long street of ash-
plastered and abandoned houses, we turned
in to the residence of the cure, which stood
beside the large church, near the centre of the
village. Father Mary, a middle-aged man
with gray eyes and a fresh complexion, came
out in cassock and incongruous white cork
helmet to meet us ; gave us a cordial welcome
and led us into the refectory of the parish
house, where we all sat down at a big table
half covered with a white cloth, to take re-
freshments, discuss the volcano, and exchange
items of Martinique news.
The cure did not look at all like a man
68
\
\ -■
THE NEW ^:OHK
IPDBLIC LIBRARY
«p"
BASSE POINTE — MORNE ROUGE
who had been subjected to long continued
nervous strain, or who had been rendered ap-
prehensive by weeks of imminent danger.
On the contrary he seemed as buoyant and
light-hearted as a frolicsome boy; laughing
and joking with Mr. Clerc and Mr. Chancel ;
and exclaiming in feigned astonishment when
Mr. Varian and I declined the stiff drinks of
rum that he poured out for us, "What!
No rum ? Is this, then, a temperance so-
ciety?" But a glance at his f^ce when it
was serious and in repose showed that he was
a man of character and courage. Some min-
isters of God, living in imminent danger near
the crater of an active volcano, might have
become morbid and gloomy in the presence
of what seemed to be manifestations of Divine
wrath ; but Father Mary's nature was too
brave, sane and cheerful to be warped by fear
or gloomy superstition. He might not be
able to reconcile the destruction of St. Pierre
with the providence of a loving and merciful
Father ; but he trusted where he could not
understand; discharged faithfully all his
duties as a priest, a Christian and a man ;
and lived, as he had always lived, a brave,
69
THE TRAGEDY OF PELJ&E
cheerful, natural life, even in the threatening
shadow of death. Vicar-General Parel was
mistaken when he wrote to the bishop of the
diocese " Pere Mary has at length left
Morne Rouge, being the last to abandon the
place/' * Pere Mary never left his post
of duty.
After refreshing ourselves with a light
breakfast, we all went out at Father Mary*s
suggestion, to take a look at the village, and
at the mountain from that point of view.
The southwestern slope of Mont Pelee
as seen from Morne Rouge, consists of a
series of high wooded ridges or aretes, with
deep intervening valleys, running down to
the sea from the Calebasse divide. Before
the volcano became active, the bottoms of
these valleys were covered with truck farms,
garden-plots or plantations of cane; and
there were little nooks or patchwork squares
of cultivation, here and there, even on the
wooded slopes of the aretes ; but the whole
country, when we saw it, looked bare, deso-
late, and gray, The forests were apparently
* Century Magazine, August, 1902, p. 617,
70
BASSE POINTE — MORNE ROUGE
dead, the luxuriant undergrowth was leafless,
and a deep layer of rain-compacted ashes
gave a sterile, desert-like aspect to a land-
scape that was once as green and fair as any
in Martinique.
Before Mont Pelee became active, Morne
Rouge was one of the most beautiful villages
on the islan^. Situated at a height of 1400
feet, on the crest of the divide between the
Atlantic and the Caribbean, it overlooked
the ocean on both sides, and commanded a
magnificent view, not only of the volcano,
but of the Carbet peaks, the rich, fertile
valley of Champ Flore, and the green, forest-
clad mornes beyond the Capot and on the
headwaters of the Roxelane. It was, as the
cure said, " a real Garden of Eden," set in a
natural cyclorama of blue water, verdant
hills, and cloud-capped volcanic peaks. It
had long been a favorite place of resort for the
citizens of St. Pierre, many of whom had
country villas there, and the commune of
which it was the centre had a population of
nearly 5000 souls. At the time of our visit,
its beautiful gardens had been ruined by ashes ;
volcanic dust lay deep in its streets ; niner
71
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
tenths of its houses were closed and empty ;
and it had less than 200 inhabitants.
Nearly all who could get away fled after the
catastrophe of May 8th ; but Father Mary
had a little asylum or house of refuge there
for the old, poor, and infirm of his parish, and
as it was impossible for these helpless people
to escape, he, with a few of the bolder spirits
of the villiage, stood by them, watching, with
steady and unfaltering courage, eruptions that
devastated the neighboring slopes of the
mountain ; swept the village with storms of
ashes ; shook its houses with the thunder of
subterranean explosions ; set the skies ablaze
with volcanic lightning, and threatened
Morne Rouge with the fate of St. Pierre.
Several times between the 8th of May and
the 1st of June, the terror-stricken popula-
tion of northern Martinique fled from the
volcano en masse ; but Father Mary, far
inside the danger line, stood by his helpless
and frightened people, expecting to die but
incapable of shirking his duty or deserting
his post. When I remember how exposed
Morne Rouge was ; how near it stood to the
main crater, and how terrifying some of the
72
BASSE POINUE— MORNE ROUGE
eruptions must have appeared from that
point of view, the devoted priest in his worn,
shabby cassock, standing by his aged and
feeble parishioners and encouraging the
handful of villagers who remained to help
him, seems to me a really impressive and
heroic figure.
73
IV
IN THE TRACK OF THE
VOLCANIC HURRICANE
NEXT to Father Mary, the most in-
teresting person in Morne Rouge,
at the time of our visit, was Au-
guste Ciparis, a negro criminal who lived
through the destruction of St. Pierre in a
dungeon of the city jail. We had heard of
this man in Fort de France, and had been
told that he was the sole survivor of the
great catastrophe ; but we had not been able
to find anyone who had actually seen him, or
who knew where he was, and we had finally
come to regard him as the product of some
newspaper man's imagination. Father Mary,
however, assured us that he was a real person,
and that he had been brought to Morne Rouge
four days after the disaster by two negroes who
74
THE TRACK OF THE HURRICANE
had accidentally found him in the ruins of
the city. Of course we wanted to get a state-
ment of his unique experience, and after we
had looked around the village a little, we all
went to see him. We found him in one of
the bare, fly-infested rooms of an abandoned
wooden dwelling-house on the main street,
which the cure had turned into a sort of
lazaret As there was no physician, surgeon,
or pharmacy in the place, the unfortunate
prisoner had had no treatment, and the air of
the small, hot room was so heavy and foul
with the oflFensive odor of his neglected
burns that I could hardly force myself to
breathe it. He was sitting stark naked, on
the dirty striped mattress of a small wooden
cot, with a bloody sheet thrown over his
head like an Arab burnoose and gathered in
about the loins. He had been more fright-
fully burned, I think, than any man I had
ever seen. His face, strangely enough, had
escaped injury, and his hair had not even
been scorched ; but there were terrible burns
on his back and legs, and his badly swollen
feet and hands were covered with yellow,
oflFensive matter which had no resemblance
75
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
whatever to human skin or flesh. The
burns were apparently very deep— so deep
that blood oozed from them — and to my un-
professional eye they looked as if they might
have been made by hot steam.
When asked to describe all that happened
at the time when he received these burns,
Ciparis said that the cell he occupied in the
St. Pierre prison was an underground dun-
geon, which had no other window than a
grated aperture in the upper part of the door.
On the morning of May 8, while he was
waiting for breakfast, it suddenly grew very
dark ; and almost immediately afterward hot
air, mixed with fine ashes, came in through
the door-grating and burned him. He rushed
and jumped in agony about the cell and cried
for help; but there was no answer. He heard
no noise, saw no fire, and smelled nothing
except " what he thought was his own body,
burning." The intense heat lasted only a
moment, and during that time he breathed
as little as possible. There was no smoke
in the cell and the hot air came in through
the door-grating without any noticeable rush
or blast. He had on, at the time, hat, shirt,
76
THE TRACK OF THE HURRICANE
and trousers, but no shoes. His clothing
did not take fire, and yet his back was very
severely burned under his shirt. The water
in his cell did not get hot — or, at least, it
was not hot when he first took a drink, after
the catastrophe.
We questioned him closely with regard to
sounds and smells ; but he continued to in-
sist that he heard no explosion or loud noise
of any kind, and that there was no percepti-
ble odor of gas or sulphur in his cell. Hot
air, mixed with dust, came in at the grated
window in the upper part of the door and
burned him ; and that, he said, was all there
was of it. For a long time he groaned with
pain, and cried at intervals, " Help ! Save
me !" but no one answered, and he did not
hear a sound again until the following Sun-
day, nearly four days after the catastrophe.
Then he faintly heard human voices above
his head, and renewed his cries for help.
Somebody shouted, " Who's that ? Where
are you ? "
" I'm down here in the dungeon of the
jail," he replied. " Help ! Save me ! Get
me out ! "
77
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
corded here, just as it stands in my note-
book, without trying to edit it, or work it up
into a " picturesque " narrative.
Ciparis, who was a strong young negro
about twenty-five years of age, impressed me
as an uneducated man, of average intelligence,
whose natural temperament was stolid rather
than excitable. He answered all our ques-
tions simply and quietly, without making any
attempt to exaggerate or to heighten the ef-
fect of his narrative by embroidering it with
fanciful and marvelous details. He heard no
explosions or detonations ; saw no flames ;
smelled no sulphurous gas ; and had no feel-
ing of suffocation. He was simply burned
by hot air and hot ashes which came into his
cell through the door grating. What hap-
pened outside he did not pretend to know ;
but his testimony with regard to what hap-
pened inside could not be shaken by any
amount of cross-examination, and I shall
have occasion to refer to it when I come to a
consideration of the nature and causes of the
St. Pierre catastrophe. Thanks to Mr. Jac-
caci, who sent to the Military Hospital in
Fort de France for linseed oil, limewater,
80
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
sloping buttress brought us to the bold prom-
ontory of the Grande Reduit, where the
buttress ends suddenly in a high, steep bluff,
and the road, turning suddenly upon itself,
descends four or five hundred feet, in the
double curve of a reversed letter S, to the
valley of the Roxelane. A little chapel and
three or four deserted houses stood near the
road at the left, and on the highest part of
the bluff, facing Mont Pelee, was a life-sized,
tinted figure of Christ crucified, which was
completely covered, from head to foot, with
a sun-dried plas^r of volcanic ashes. It
looked as if a fire engine had been throwing
on it a stream of sticky mucilage thickened
with Portland cement
Getting out of our carriages, we walked
passed the crucifix and through a thicket of
leafless bushes to the extreme western end of
the bluff, from which an unobstructed view
could be had of the tornado track where it
crossed the once beautiful valley of the Roxe-
lane. A more impressive picture of ruin and
desolation it would be impossible to imagine.
The valley looked as if it had first been swept
by a frightful hurricane that had strewn it
82
THE TRACK OF THE HURRICANE
with trees, branches and the fragments of
wrecked houses, and had then been over-
whelmed by a Johnstown flood, which, after
sweeping the immense masses of wreckage
into heaps, had finally subsided, leaving every-
thing covered with a thick layer of gray mud.
Scattered here and there over the surface of
this mud were bodies of dead men, carcasses
of mules, wheels of dismembered carts, big
iron kettles, pieces of machinery from some
wrecked sugar mill, timbers, boulders, roofs
of houses, and great windrows of leafless, up-
rooted trees, which had been swept down
into the valley from the slopes above.
The western end of the Grande Reduit
was just on the edge, apparently, of the hurri-
cane's path. Some of the huts near the
chapel had been injured, but the chapel itself
was intact ; the big crucifix was still standing,
and within a radius of forty or fifty yards
there were a number of trees that had not
been touched. Behind one of the houses,
however, we found the carcass of a mule, and
a short distance down the road leading to the
valley we came upon an overturned, wrecked
carriage, half buried in a pile of broken-oflf
83
/
{
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
fifty yards from the carriage, behind one of
the palm-shacks on the crest of the hill.
The effects of the volcanic discharge, in
this case seem to have been such as would
have been produced by a hot steam-blast of
high volocity but brief duration. If Messrs.
Simonut and Lassere had been struck by the
edge of a steam discharge from an exploding
boiler, their bodies would probably have
been scalded under their clothing in precisely
the same way, and without injury to the
clothing itself; while if they had been burned
by flame or incandescent matter, their cloth-
ing and the light top of the carriage would
certainly have shown some traces of fire. As
they were on the extreme outer edge of the
blast, the steam was doubtless mixed to some
extent with air ; and the heat although great
enough to scald flesh, was not intense enough
to ignite clothing or scorch wood.
We drove down into the valley of the Roxe-
lane without finding any impassable obstruc-
tion ; but a quarter of a mile beyond the
base of the Grande Reduit we were stopped
by a barrier of immense uprooted trees,
which had been blown or washed upon the
86
THE TRACK OF THE HURRICANE
road, and which made further progress in a
wheeled vehicle impossible. Leaving our
carriages there, we walked down the hurricane
track towards St. Pierre, through a chaos of
demolished houses, uprooted trees, volcanic
boulders, broken tiles, smashed crockery,
twisted iron bedsteads, sheets of metallic
roofing, fire-scorched remains of pianos, cart-
wheels, brass chandeliers, farm implements,
bronze statuettes, and ash-covered wreckage
of every imaginable description. Houses,
solidly built of stone and cement, had been
torn to pieces and scattered as children's
play-houses of kindergarten blocks would be
torn to pieces by the discharge of a thirteen-
inch gun. Absolutely nothing of human
construction or erection seemed to have been
strong enough or solid enough to withstand
the impact of that tremendous blast.
Half or three-quarters of a mile from the
Grande Reduit, Mr. Clerc stopped in front
of a low shapeless mound of ash-plastered
building-stones, and, in a voice trembling
with emotion, said : " This was the country
house of Senator Knight's father; I knew
him well." No one would have imagined
87
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
that there had ever been a house there. It
looked like a mass of stones heaped together
at random and half buried by a sleet-storm
of ashes.
In this part of the Roxelane valley there
had been a large number of country houses
and villas belonging to wealthy residents of
St. Pierre. Some of them stood on natural
or artificial mounds between the road and the
river, and others on high terraces cut in the
hillside above the road and supported by
massive retaining walls of heavy masonry.
Most of these houses, apparently, had been
made of stone rubble ; and when the aerial
battering-ram of the tornado struck them,
they burst asunder, went to pieces, and
fell in avalanches of loose stones upon the
road below, covering it and blocking it up
so that in many places there was no trace of
a road left, and we had to pick our way
across the heaps of debris as best we could.
In the area swept by this volcanic hurri-
cane, as in the tracks of many of our western
tornadoes, there were fragile objects of one
sort or another, that had miraculously es-
caped destruction. Against a fragment of a
S8
THE TRACK OF THE HURRICANE
wall, in one place, for example, I found hang-
ing uninjured and undisturbed, a thin plaster
bas-relief of Christ before Pilate. The build-
ing had been so completely demolished that
I could not tell, from a mere inspection of
the ruins, whether it had been a private resi-
dence or a church ; but the frail bas-relief,
which might have been broken to pieces by
a blow with a lead-pencil, had sustained no in-
jury whatever. In another place, in what had
apparently been the back-yard of a country
house, I saw a wooden cage of three com-
partments faced with wire net-work, which
contained the remains of two pet animals — a
mongoose and a small bantam chicken. Both
had been killed, doubtless, by the heat of the
blast ; but the feathers of the chicken had
not been scorched, and the cage, although
covered with ashes, had not been broken or
burned.
The ruin and desolation in this valley
would have been impressive and terrible
enough, even if not related in any way to
human activities and human existence ; but
most of these wrecked houses had been the
homes of the living, and were now cairns of
89
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£e
stones heaped up over the remains of the
dead. The hot, breezeless air was heavy
and fetid with the stench of decaying bodies,
and every now and then we came upon a
swollen, blackened corpse lying out in the
open or half buried in an ash-cemented pile
of stones. In two or three places, on the
road, or beside it, I saw human bodies that
had been rolled, tumbled, and smashed by
the tornado until they were nothing but
huddled-up masses of torn, bloody clothing
and lacerated flesh, out of which were stick-
ing the splintered remains of arm and thigh
bones. Poor Mr. Clerc, who had been en-
tertained in many of the houses whose ruins
we passed, and who knew personally nearly
all of the people in this valley, became so
overwrought at last with grief, nervous ex-
citement, and the horror of the environment
that he broke down in a fit of sobbing and
walked away from the party until he could
recover his self-control.
Half-way down from the Grande Reduit
to St. Pierre a small stream came into the
tornado valley from the south, and just at
the junction of this stream with the Roxelane
90
THE TRACK OF THE HURRICANE
there stood, before the eruption of May 8, a
pretty suburban village known as the Village
of the Three Bridges. At the time of our
visit it had been completely wrecked and de-
stroyed, with the exception of four or five
houses which stood in the mouth of the
lateral ravine under the shelter of a high
bluflf. The front door of the first one we
came to was open, and a rocking-chair was
standing out on the piazza. Just inside the
door, on a narrow cot-bed, lay, in a perfectly
natural position, the figure of a dead man.
He was plastered from head to foot with
ashes, but, in places where rain had blown in
through the door' or window and washed
the ashes oflT, I could see the skin of his
neck, face and hands. Flies were crawling
all over him, and from a wound in his head
blood had run down on the mattress and
dripped from there to the floor, where it had
made a little pool. There were no footprints
in the ashes, and the house had not been
entered by any one since the catastrophe of
May 8. The man had evidently been killed
instantly ; but whether by heat, by noxious
gas, or by a volcanic stone, it was impossible
91
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
to determine. All that we could be certain
of was that he was lying on that cot when the
hurricane swept across the valley and that he
never m®ved afterward.
In the next room there were a man, a
woman, and a child ; the man lying on the
floor, face downward, with his arms stretched
out, and the woman and child at a little dis-
tance, huddled together with their arms
under them. All were in such a state of
decomposition that they would have been
wholly unrecognizable. The adjoining house
was also full of dead, but they were so en-
crusted with ashes that it was impossible to
determine age, sex, or color. Just across
the stream, close to the bluflT, was a pretty
two-story country house with a good-sized
front yard which had been filled with geomet-
rical flower-beds and blossoming shrubs.
We explored it from top to bottom, but
found nothing alive in it except a huge black
tarantula, four or five inches across, which
ran out of a crevice over one of the second-
story doors. The venomous insect had sur-
vived where all the higher forms of life had
perished.
92
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
self-controlled at all times ; but Mr. Clerc
was nervously overwrought, and Mr. Varian
admitted to me that those silent houses, filled
with ash-plastered corpses, were the " spook-
iest " places he had ever seen.
Tired, faint, and sickened with the stench
of dead bodies, we finally turned our faces
homeward, climbed slowly up the valley
over the stone-piles of wrecked houses, and
drove back to Vive.
When I went to bed that night, I found
it utterly impossible to sleep. The atmos-
phere of the room seemed to be pervaded
by a faint, corpse-like odor, and I imag-
ined that I could see a gray ash-plastered
figure with flies crawling over it in every
dark corner of the room. Satisfied, at last,
that the odor of death could not be wholly
imaginary, I got up, struck a light, and
began to examine in turn the things that I
had brought back from the tornado valley.
A little etched calabash that I had picked
up in one of the houses of the village of
Trois Fonts proved to be so saturated with
the odor of a rotting corpse that it had
tainted the air of the whole room. I put it
94
THE TRACK OF THE HURRICANE
out of the window on the roof of the piazza,
extinguished my light, and again went to
bed ; but I had a restless, feverish night, and
began, for the first time, to regard that in-
fernal volcano with a feeling of dread.
95
V
A NIGHT ERUPTION OF
MONT PELfiE
AS a result of heat, fatigue, sleepless-
ness, and the drinking of unwhole-
some, ash-contaminated water, we all
felt rather weak and depressed on the morn-
ing after our return from the tornado valley
of the Roxelane, and when Mr. Jaccaci, with
unconquerable energy, proposed an expedi-
tion to the sub-crater of the Falaise, Mr.
Varian and I had to admit that we were not
physically equal to it. Varian, who was
really ill, went to bed again after breakfast ;
and I was afraid that if I continued to expose
myself, day after day, to the hot tropical sun-
shine, I should bring on another attack of
the low malarial fever from which I had al-
ready been suffering at intervals for two or
96
f
A NIGHT ERUPTION OF PELfiE
three years. We all wanted, moreover, to
attempt an ascent of the volcano the next
day, and it seemed to Mr. Varian and me
that we should do better if we reserved all
the strength we had for that undertaking.
Mr. Clerc, however, was apparently ready if
not anxious to go, and a party consisting of
Mr. Jaccaci, Mr. Clerc, Mr. Chancel, and a
n^egro journalist named Confiant, who had
^^been spending a day or two at Vive as a
cj^y^est, started for the Falaise soon after
\ lunch.
The sub-crater on our side of the volcano
was not more than three miles and a half, in
an air line, from Mr. Clerc's house ; and as
it was situated on one of the lower slopes of
the mountain, near the old Calebasse road, it
could be reached without much difficulty.
We had seen white clouds of steam rising
from it occasionally, but no one had yet visited
it, and as it seemed that day to be absolutely
quiescent, Mr. Clerc and Mr. Jaccaci were
anxious to examine it more closely — partly as
a matter of scientific curiosity, and partly to
ascertain whether it was really a serious men-
ace to Vive.
97
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
After the party had gone, I studied, through
a field-glass, the ash-covered, deeply furrowed
slopes of the volcano, looked now and then
for signs of disturbance in the gorge of the
Falaise, and watched the great volume of yel-
lowish-white vapor which boiled up out of
the main crater, rose majestically in immense
cloudy thunder-heads to a height of four or
five thousand feet, and then drifted slowly
away to the westward under the influence of
the steady trade wind.
Up to this time. May 26, we had seen
nothing whatever to indicate that Mont Pelee
was in a state of dangerous, or even serious,
activity. Grfeat clouds of vapor rolled up in-
cessantly from the main crater, but they were
carried away from us by the trade wind ; no
ashes fell ; there were no rumblings or deto-
nations ; and as I sat looking at the gray,
desolate mountain that afternoon, I said to
myself, " Jaccaci, Clerc, and the others will
have a safe trip ; the volcano isn't going to
do anything to-day."
The crater-exploring party returned about
five o'clock and gave us a graphic description
of the wild gorge of the upper Falaise, which,
98
A NIGHT ERUPTION OF PELEE
Mr. Jaccaci said, was the most impressive,
frightful, and unearthly place he had ever
seen, although he was familiar with Vesuvius,
Stromboli, and Etna. The crater, with its
deep pit and vault-like openings into the vol-
cano, proved to be empty ; but the desolate,
eroded caflon in which it was situated looked
like a Dore picture of the gateway to hell. I
had not seen Mr. Jaccaci so roused and ex-
cited since our arrival in Martinique ; and I
regretted that I had not gone with the party,
fever or no fever. They had evidently seen
something that was treniendous, unearthly,
and awe-inspiring.
When dinner was served that night, about
seven o'clock, a larger company assembled
than usual. Mr. Clerc's brother from Trinite
had come to make him a short visit, and there
were two or three other guests from neighbor-
ing plantations or from Basse Pointe. Mr.
Varian came down, ill as he was, and sat with
us for an hour or more, but finally had an at-
tack of faintness, and asked to be excused,
and left the room. It was then a little after
eight o'clock. He had just gone upstairs
when we were startled by three or four dull,
99
7^*^^^o
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
heavy explosions — boom ! boom-boom !
boom ! — like the sound of cannonading at a
distance of two or three miles. Mr. Clerc
shouted excitedly, " Le volcan ! Le volcan ! "
and, springing from his seat, rushed out of
doors, with all the rest of us at his heels.
There were a lot of mango-trees just in front
of the house, and we had to run twenty or
thirty yards before we could see the volcano
at all. When we got out into the open, it
burst suddenly upon our startled eyes, and a
more splendid and at the same time terrifying
object I had never seen nor imagined. The
whole mountain, from base to summit, was
ablaze with volcanic lightning, and the air
trembled with short, heavy, thunderous ex-
plosions, like the firing of thirteen-inch guns
from half a dozen battleships in action.
Straight up from the crater, clearly outlined
against the starry sky, rose a column of inky-
black vapor, a thousand feet in height, which
looked like a shaft of solid ebony. Before I
had time to breathe twice it had reached a
height of two thousand feet ; in thirty seconds
it had grown three thousand feet more, with-
out the least increase in width ; and in less
lOO
A NIGHT ERUPTION OF PELEE
than two minutes it stood ten thousand feet
above the crater and was still going up. In
every part of this ascending column of black
vapor there were bursting huge electric stars
of volcanic lightning, which illuminated the
whole mountain, while the accompanying
roar of thunderous explosions sounded like
a great naval battle at sea.
I was so absorbed in the magnificence of
the spectacle that I had no consciousness of
my situation, and did not even notice what
was going on about me until I heard Mr.
Clerc shout in English, " Gentlemen, it is
time to go ! This is a dangerous place ! We
will go to the house of my good friend at
Acier ! "
Recalled suddenly by Mr. Clerc's voice to
a consciousness of my environment, I looked
around and found myself in a throng of
fugitives, servants, hostlers, laborers from the
sugar mill, and employees of the estate gen-
erally, who had rushed out of their houses or
run into the yard from the road at the first
alarm, and were staring at the volcano in
what seemed to be a daze of bewilderment
and terror. Mr. Clerc's excited cry, " Gen-
ZOI
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
tlemen, it is time to go ! " and a hasty order
which he gave in French to his overseer, Mr.
Chancel, roused the silent crowd from its
stupor of amazement and threw it into a
panic of excitement and fear. Everybody
rushed in one direction or another, and the
yard instantly became a scene of the wildest
confusion. Fugitives from Ajoupa Bouillon
and Basse Pointe, who had stopped at Vive
to rest or bivouac, broke into headlong flight;
employees of the estate rushed away to their
houses, calling loudly to their wives and chil-
dren as they ran ; Mr. Chancel and three or
four hostlers started for the stable to get
a horse or saddle-mule for Mademoiselle
Marie; Mr. Clerc remembering that Varian
was ill, but forgetting his name, ran into the
house and shouted up the stairway, "Mr.
Artist ! Mr. Artist ! It is time to go ! " and
the thunderings of the volcano, the shouts of
excited men, the barking of dogs, the wailing
of frightened children, and the shrill cries of
half-frantic women made up a tumult that
was enough to shake the coolest self-posses-
sion.
I wavered for a moment, took another
X02
-r
A NIGHT ERUPTION OF PEL£E
look at the tremendous lightning-shot pillar
of black cloud over the crater of the volcano,
remembered St. Pierre and the ash-plastered
bodies of the dead in the tornado valley of
the Roxelane, and made up my mind that,
in the words of Mr. Clerc, it was " time to
go." I cannot remember whether I said
anything to Mr. Jaccaci and Mr. Varian or
not. We were all half dazed, ourselves, by
the suddenness of the eruption and the
frightful appearance of the volcano, and there
was no time or opportunity for consultation
as to the best course of action. Mr. Clerc
had virtually taken command with the shout
" It is time to go ! " and I felt no disposition
to question his judgment or dispute his au-
thority. I determined, however, that I would
not go without my note book and camera.
I had left them upstairs in my bedroom, and,
as I remembered exactly where they were, I
found them without difficulty, even in the
darkness ; but I could not possibly find my
cork helmet. I therefore caught up a mack-
intosh that happened to be hanging over the
back of a chair, and threw it across my arm,
with the idea that if volcanic stones or hot
103
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
cinders should begin to fall I could fold it up
into a sort of cushion and use it as a protec-
tion for my head. That volcano had already
thrown stones large enough to kill into the
yard of the Military Hospital at Fort de
France, fifteen miles away ; and I didn't want
to be caught out in the open bareheaded. I
had only slippers on my feet, but there was
no time then to look for, or put on, shoes.
When I got back into the yard, after an
absence of about a minute and a half, the
crowd had somewhat diminished; but Mr.
Jaccaci and Mr. Varian were still there and
Mr. Clerc and Mr. Chancel were just putting
Mademoiselle Marie on a horse. I ran out
beyond the mango trees to take one more
look at the volcano. A dull red glow, streaked
with what seemed to be tongues of flame, rose
two or three hundred feet above the main
crater, forming a fiery base for a shaft of in-
tensely black vapor, ten or twelve thousand
feet in height, which had already begun to
mushroom out at the top. Showers of in-
candescent stones were falling over the sum-
mit of the mountain, and the vappr-column
was pierced incessantly by short streaks of
104
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
idly in the direction of Grande Anse. I
heard occasionally an exclamation of " Oh,
mon Dieu ! " from some frightened woman,
but, as a rule, both men and women fled in
silence, never stopping or looking behind
them.
At the top of the first ascending slope in
the road, about a quarter of a mile from
Vive, I stopped for an instant to recover my
breath and look again at the volcano. The
mushrooming cloud of vapor was then mov-
ing swiftly eastward, opening out like a huge
black fan as it advanced, and its sharply de-
fined edge had almost reached the zenith.
The volcano itself was still ablaze with light-
ning, and the star-like bombs were bursting
around the crater, in the black pillar of cloud
that rose from it, and in every part of the
inky canopy overhead. The thunderous ex-
plosions, the incessant flashing out of brilliant
meteoric stars, the dull red glow at the base
of the ascending vapor-column, and the
shower of incandescent stones and cinders,
streaking with fire a background of impene-
trable gloom, made up an exhibition of in-
fernal energy that, to one who had seen St
1 06
A NIGHT ERUPTION OF PEL^E
Pierre, was simply appalling. It looked like
the end of all things.
As the great blazing, thundering tide of
black vapor rolled eastward it blotted out the
constellations, one after another, until there
was left only a streak of clear sky, ten or
fifteen degrees in width, along the southern
horizon. It was then much darker than when
we left Vive, but the brilliant flashes of
stellar lightning in the volcanic mantle over-
head illumined the gray, ash-covered road, so
that we had no difficulty in finding our way, so
long as we did not look upward. But I wanted
to look upward most of the time. The light-
ning was so extraordinary, and so different
from anything I had ever before seen, that
I stumbled along, with upturned face, watch-
ing the play of the short, quick flashes, and
the star-like outbursts with which they ended,
until my eyes were so dazzled that I could
not see the man who was running beside me,
much less the horse of Mademoiselle Marie,
ahead. Jaccaci, Varian and I tried to keep
together ; but there was a stream of fugitives
in the road, and in the darkness, confusion
and excitement we sometimes became sepa-
107
THE TRAGEDY OF PELl&E
rated. A shout, however, of " Jaccaci ! Va-
rian! Where are you ? " always brought the
cheery reply, " Here we are ; all right ! "
From Clerc and Chancel, who were running
ahead beside the horse of Mademoiselle
Marie, we heard nothing, and I had not the
faintest idea where they intended to go ; but
I presumed we were all bound for the house
of the " good friend" at Acier where Mr.
Clerc had been spending his nights.
The evening was intensely close and hot,
and I feared that Varian, who had been ill
all day, would faint or collapse before we
could reach a place of shelter ; but he showed
no sign of distress, and said, in reply to every
inquiry, " Oh, I'm all right." Mr. Jaccaci,
who was apparently the least excited man in
the party, tried at intervals to encourage and
quiet the panic-stricken fugitives who were
hurrying along the road beside us ; and when,
after an unusually brilliant outburst of stellar
lightning, or a terrifying explosion overhead,
some frightened nativewoman began to whim-
per, or cried distractedly, " Oh, mon Dieu !
mon Dieu !" he would say, " Cheer up,
mother ! It's nothing serious. Dangerous ?
io8
A NIGHT ERUPTION OF PELl^E
Not a bit ; nothing is going to hurt you,"
and the reassured woman would trudge along
quietly, more comforted than if a dozen
paper chromo-lithographs of the Marti-
nique Madonna had been pinned over her
heart.
If some scientific investigator of volcanic
phenomena should ask me how much time
the black vapor-cloud occupied in going
from the crater to a point vertically over the
seacoast at Grande Anse, and how long we
were running or walking on the road east of
Vive, I should have to make a random, un-
trustworthy guess. Time and space did not
register in my consciousness ; and all that I
am now able to say is that, when we climbed
the last hill and found ourselves among the
big trees in front of the old colonial man-
sion of Acier, stars of volcanic lightning were
still bursting not only in the black canopy
above our heads, but far east of us, over the
ocean, at a distance of at least seven miles
from the crater.
We reached shelter just in time to escape a
shower of ashes and smalU hot volcanic
stones, which began to patter down, like sleet,
X09
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
through the leaves of the trees as we burst in
at the side door of the dark and empty house.
I fortunately happened to have a box of
matches in my pocket, and scratching one on
the door I lighted a bit of a candle that I
found on the dining table. The room in-
stantly filled with fugitives — mostly negroes
— who had come with us or preceded us, and
as their faces and figures took form and color
in the light of that flaring candle-end, it was
evident that this was one of the occasions
when birds that are not of a feather flock
together. It would have been hard to find,
that night, in all Martinique, a more hetero-
geneous roomful of people. At Vive we had
been gentlemen, guests, servants, sugar-mill
hands, Hindoo coolies, negro women, and a
lady. At Acier we were simply a lot of
tired Pelee fugitives. I looked vainly for
Mr. Clerc, his brother Josef, and the negro
journalist, Confiant, who sat next me at din-
ner. All had gone on in the direction of
Grande Anse, and the journalist, who had
lost twenty-eight relatives in St. Pierre, fled
fifteen miles down the eastern coast before he
finally stopped at Trinite. The owner of
no
A NIGHT ERUPTION OF PEL^E
the mansion where we were, had run away
with all his servants, long before we arrived ;
and as we subsequently learned, there had
been a general stampede, and that this gen-
eral stampede of many frightened people had
extended not only from Vive to Acier, but
also from not a few villages and towns as
distant as Grande Anse, Marigot and St.
Maria.
When we reached the house at Acier, we
were tired, breathless, and dripping with per-
spiration ; but Mr. Chancel found some rum
in a wine-closet, and after taking a " bracer "
of that fiery stimulant and resting a little, I
felt sufficiently revived to go out into the
yard and look once more at Mont Pelee. It
was then pitch dark. The electric stars had
ceased bursting overhead ; the glow above
the crater had disappeared, and the volcano
had wrapped itself in a shroud of impenetra-
ble gloom. A storm, however, seemed to be
raging above it, and the bolts of smoke-red-
dened lightning which shot down upon it at
intervals were followed by long peals of roll-
ing, reverberating thunder.
When I returned to the dining-room,
III
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
Mademoiselle Marie had taken charge of the
house ; found and lighted a lamp ; sent the
negroes to the kitchen ; and was getting bed-
rooms ready for us in the second story.
Varian, who was feeling the chill of wet un-
derclothing and the reaction from excitement
and fatigue, soon went upstairs to bed ; and
while Mr. Jaccaci was discussing the volcano
with Mr. Chancel, I sat down at the table to
write up my notes.
The feature of the eruption that made the
deepest impression upon me was the stellar
lightning. The uprush of black smoke, the
glow over the crater, and the shower of incan-
descent stones and cinders were all phenom-
ena that had been observed and described be-
fore ; but the short, thin streaks of lightning
followed by star-like explosions in the vol-
canic mantle — not only above the crater, but
miles away from it — were entirely new. The
distinctive characteristics of this lightning
were the shortness of the streak, the compar-
atively great size and brilliancy of the spark,
or light-burst, at the end of the streak, and
the single booming report that followed.
Sometimes three or four great sparks, con-
112
A NIGHT ERUPTION OF PEL£E
nected by fiery streaks, would flash out to-
gether in this way :
and at other times the stars would burst so
far back in the cloud that the streaks were in-
visible and there was only a circular irradia-
tion of the vapor. If there was any storm
lightning of the ordinary kind in the earlier
stages of the eruption, it was so much less
noticeable than the stellar lightning that it
escaped my observation ; and I am quite
sure that there was no rolling, reverberating
thunder at all until near the close of the dis-
play, when reddish lightning-bolts began to
dart down on the volcano from the develop-
ing storm-cloud over the crater. Before that
time all, or nearly all, of the electric discharges
had ended in stellar light-bursts, and all of
113
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
the thunder had been made up of separate
and distinct reports, like the thunder of a
heavy and rapid cannonade.
The general effect of the stellar lightning
was that of a short, thin electric discharge
striking and igniting a pocket of inflamma-
ble gas in the cloud of volcanic vapor. I
am not at all sure, however, that the star-like
explosions were caused in this way. It is
hard to observe accurately in a time of such
excitement ; but I am almost sure that the
stellar light-bursts were sometimes wholly
outside of the volcanic mantle. It might pos-
sibly be worth while to ascertain whether any
such effects as these can be produced in the
laboratory by sending an electric discharge of
high tension through hot air or steam densely
charged with fine rock-dust. It hardly seems
possible that there could have been isolated,
discrete pockets of inflammable gas in that
volcanic cloud, seven miles away from the
crater; and if not, the phenomenon must
have been wholly electrical.
This stellar lightning, in connection with
a volcanic eruption, has been observed, I
think, before ; but it does not seem to have
114
A NIGHT ERUPTION OF PELEE
been commented upon or investigated. Cap-
tain Watson, of the British ship Charles
Bal, saw what he afterward described as a
" continual roll of balls of white fire " over
Krakatoa, when he was twelve miles off that
volcano, during the night eruption of August
^7> 1883 ; and *^ fire-balls " were seen in the
vapor of the New Zealand volcano Tarawera
in 1886. Finally, the Japanese geologist
Kikuchi,of the Imperial University of Tokyo,
reports that in the great eruption of the Japa-
nese volcano of Bandai-san in 1888, "the peo-
ple of Inawashiro and the neighboring villages
saw, through the falling ashes " (in the day-
time), ^^innumerable vivid sparks of fir eon the
slopes of Obandai and Akahani, at consider-
able distances from the crater. These sparks
were quite different in nature from lightning,
presenting rather an appearance as of the ^r-
ing of innumerable guns^^
There can be little doubt, I think, that
these " vivid sparks," which were bright
enough to be seen by the inhabitants of sev-
eral villages at a distance of two or three miles
in the daytime, were precisely such star-like
outbursts as we saw on the night of May 26
"5
THE TRAGEDY OF PELEE
in the vapor of Mont Pelee. When I
rushed out of doors, at the beginning of the
eruption, the first impression made upon my
mind was that brilliantly white meteors were
being thrown out of the ascending vapor-col-
umn in every direction — sometimes upward
and sometimes downward toward the slopes
of the volcano. But this observation is not
wholly trustworthy. All I am sure of is that the
whole volcano seemed to be ablaze with these
electric stars, which suggested both meteors
and huge sparks from a gigantic Leyden jar.
At eleven o'clock, when I finished writing
up my notes of the eruption and again went
out of doors, the black cloud overhead was
growing perceptibly thinner, and seemed to
be drifting away to the northward. Mont
Pelee was still wrapped in dark vapor, but
there were no lightning flashes over the crater ;
no sound of any kind came from that direc-
tion, and the volcano had apparently sus-
pended operations. When I returned to the
house, Mr. Jaccaci, who had seemed for an
hour to be more than usually thoughtful and
moody, said to me, " What do you think
about going back to Vive ? "
ii6
1
1
I.
t^^
S^uc •'
v^C''^-
'^ I
L
\
A NIGHT ERUPTION OF PEL£E
" Now — to-night ? " I inquired.
" Yes ; as soon as it gets light enough."
" I don't see any particular use," I said,
" in going back to a place we've just run away
from. Shan't we be comfortable here ? "
" Oh, yes," he said, " I suppose so ; but I
don't like this running away from things.
Besides that, somebody ought to look after
Mr. Clerc's house. We simply abandoned
it, leaving all the doors open, and it might be
looted."
"So far as the running away is concerned,"
I replied, " I haven't a bit of feeling, and I
don't see why you should have. If you were
in a deep valley and saw a Johnstown flood
coming down on you, wouldn't you get out
of the way if you could ? "
" Yes — probably — but if you and I and
Varian had been alone at Vive we should have
stood our ground. It was Clerc and the
others who stampeded us. I hate to do any-
thing that has to be explained."
Well, Field Marshal," I said laughingly,
if you'll just describe, in your eloquent way,
what we saWy I don't think anybody will
ever call for an explanation of what we did.
"7
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
However, if you want to go back to Vive to-
night, I'm with you. My underclothing is
all wet ; I'm getting chilly ; and I'd like a
bath and a change, anyway."
At half-past eleven it was light enough to
see the road, and Mr. Jaccaci, Mr. Chancel
and I started back on foot. When we
reached Vive, just before midnight, we found
a crowd of silent, terror-stricken fugitives
huddled close together in the shelter of the
house, at the end of the piazza that was
farthest away from the volcano. Somebody
had put out the lights on the dining table
and closed the doors, and nothing seemed to
have been disturbed.
We went to our rooms, refreshed ourselves
with a bath, a medicinal dose of rum, and a
smoke, and had just gone to bed when we
heard footsteps on the stairs, and, to our
great astonishment, in burst Mr. Clerc. He
looked tired and anxious ; his wet hair was
plastered down over his forehead ; and he
was evidently excited.
" Well, gentlemen," he said, " wastit that
an explosion ! Ai ! ai ! ai ! I've come back
with two carriages to take you away."
ii8
r
A NIGHT ERUPTION OF PEL^E
" Thank you/' said Mr. Jaccaci, coolly;
" we don't want to go away."
" But you can't stay here ! " he cried ex-
citedly ; " it's dangerous ! You don't know
what that volcano is going to do. I've seen
four explosions — -fourV* (holding up four
fingers to me) " and I don't want to see any
more — God forbid ! But I've come back
after you."
" We're very comfortable here," said Mr.
Jaccaci, "and I'm not going to get up again
to-night — volcano or no volcano."
" But, gentlemen ! " expostulated Mr.
Clerc, "you don't understand. This is
serious — very serious ! Vive is a dangerous
place. You don't know what may happen
to you before morning."
Mr. Jaccaci still refused to get up, and I
felt satisfied that nothing short of a Krakatoa
explosion would drive him away from Vive
again that night.
" Well, gentlemen," said poor Mr. Clerc
at last, " you are my guests. I feel respon-
sible for your safety, and I have come back
here, after midnight, with two carriages, to
take you to Trinite. You won't go, and I
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
can't do any more. I've warned you, and
you must do as you think best. If you stay,
I shall have to bid you good-by. I am
going, myself, to Fort de France."
We thanked him most cordially for his
warm-hearted hospitality, for his kindness,
and for the courage and devotion that he
had shown in coming back after us, but told
him that we had come to Martinique to
study that volcano, and we didn't care to run
away from it twice in one night. He shook
hands with us, wished us good luck, bade us
good-by, and started for Trinite. A few
days later he went to Guadeloupe after his
family, and sailed thence, by the first French
transatlantic steamer, for Havre. The con-
ditions of life on the island of Martinique
had become, as he said, "impossibly."
We got through the night at Vive without
an alarm, and at half-past six the next morn-
ing we were joined by Mr. Varian and
Mademoiselle Marie, who, also, had decided
to return.
The volcano was in a state of intense
activity and looked extremely threatening
and dangerous. The vapor had all cleared
1 20
THE TRAGEDY OF PELl&E
and black showers of falling ashes, and
seemed to me more threatening and terrify-
ing than ever. Before noon I had become
so wrought up by anxiety and nervous strain
that my imagination began to run away with
me, and I suddenly felt a vague but over-
whelming premonition of some impending
catastrophe. Going to Mr. Jaccaci*s bedside
I said to him : " If you feel able to get up, I
wish you'd come and look at this volcano."
He walked feebly to the side window in the
upper story of the house, gazed fixedly at the
volcano for fully a minute and then said :
"It looks as Vesuvius must have looked five
minutes before the destruction of Pompeii.
If you want to get out of this, Tm ready to
go."
" I've been wanting to get out of this," I
said, " for the last four hours. The thing
is getting on my nerves. If you and Varian
feel able to ride I'm in favor of leaving here
at once."
We summoned Mr. Chancel, held a vol-
cano-council, and decided to close the house
and seek a safer place of abode. Ox-carts
were brought to the door ; mattresses, bed-
122
A NIGHT ERUPTION OF PEL^E
ding, personal baggage, table-linen, wine, food,
and such other things as we were likely to
need were put into them, mules were har-
nessed to a light double carriage, and we all
strated for Acier, leaving Vive to its fate.
113
VI
ACIER AND THE CALE
BASSE ROAD
IT would be hard to find, in all the islands
of Martinique, a country place that is
more beautifully situated than the old
colonial mansion of Acier. When we rushed
into it, on the night of the eruption of May
26, darkness prevented us from getting any
clear idea of its location or environment ; but
when we returned there, the next afternoon,
we all agreed that a more picturesque and
commanding site for a house jcould hardly
have been found along that coast. Morne
Jacob, one of the outlying foothills of the
Carbet group of peaks, throws out on its
northern side, toward the Domenica channel,
a number of long sloping ridges, or but-
tresses, separated one from another by deep
1*4
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfeE
session, almost as unceremoniously as we had
taken possession the night before. It was an
indefensible course of procedure, perhaps, but
Mr. Jaccaci and Mr. Varian were not at all
well and we had to have some place to stay.
Besides that, if a man runs away and aban-
dons his house he must expect that it will be
treated as a derelict. We therefore carried
in our bedding and food, set the rooms in
order, lighted a taper before a life-sized
chromo-lithograph of a Madonna with sword-
pierced heart in the upper hall, put a fresh
cloth on the dining table, kindled fires in the
kitchen charcoal-braziers, got luncheon, and
when, a little later, Mr. M , the owner of
the estate, came back to see what had hap-
pened to his abandoned property, we were
fully prepared to take him to board, as a
homeless fugitive, and give him the best we
had in the house. He looked rather sur-
prised — not to say dazed — when he found
us in full possession of the premises ; but a
few words from Mr. Chancel and Mademoi-
selle Marie cleared up the situation, and he
begged us courteously to make ourselves
perfectly at home.
126
ACIER — THE CALEB ASSE ROAD
Mont Pelee continued very active all the
afternoon. Dense clouds of dark yellow
mud smoke rose incessantly from the main
crater, and the sky, behind the ascending
vapor-column, was one vast black sheet of
falling ashes; but we no longer felt appre-
hensive. Acier, although only a little far-
ther away from the volcano than Vive, was
much safer than the latter as a place of resi-
dence, on account of its topographical situa-
tion. Vive was so low that it might be over-
whelmed by a tidal wave, or swept into the
sea, as the Guerin sugar-mill had been, by a
flood of mud and water from the gorge and
Falaise ; but Acier was not menaced by either
of these dangers. Falling stones might reach
us, or, if the volcano should split open on
the eastern side, we might be struck by such
a blast as the one that destroyed St. Pierre ;
but these were extremely remote possibilities
and gave us no uneasiness.
Jaccaci and Varian spent most of the after-
noon in bed ; but after dinner they began to
feel better, and we all went out and sat in
rocking-chairs on the lawn, watching the vol-
cano, listening to the faint intermittent roar
127
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
of the surf, and enjoying the cool freshness
of the gentle trade-wind. The twenty-four
hours had made almost as great a change as
could possibly have been made in our feel-
ings and our environment. Monday night
we were rushing, panic-stricken, away from
Vive, under a black cloud that blazed with
volcanic lightning and shook the air with the
thunder of a heavy cannonade. Tuesday
night we sat comfortably in rocking-chairs
on the lawn of a pleasant country house,
smoking, talking, and paying little more at-
tention to the volcano than to the fireflies
that flashed their tiny lamps in dark recesses
of the shrubbery, or the bats that swooped
and wheeled noiselessly over our heads.
Mont Pelee, however, was slowly gathering
its energies for another outburst.
Wednesday morningdawned cool and clear,
and when I went out of doors, about six
o'clock, I could see nothing to indicate a re-
newal of volcanic activity. A cloud of yel-
lowish-brown smoke was drifting away from
the main crater, but it did not rise to a great
height, and looked much less threatening
than on the previous day. After breakfast,
128
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
in bright sunshine, made a spectacle of almost
unimaginable beauty and grandeur.
As the force of the tremendous subterra-
nean explosion spent itself, the rolling con-
volutions of vapor lost their sharpness of
outline and grew darker ; the cloudy column
began to mushroom out at the top, and a
deep shadow crept down the slopes of the
mountain and across the valley of the Capot
as the murky cloud of dust-laden steam
rolled slowly eastward over the plantation of
Vive. Sharp lightning, followed by peals of
rolling, reverberating thunder, then began to
streak down on the volcano from the over-
hanging cloud, and a black, crape-like screen
of falling ashes soon hid more than two-
thirds of the western sky.
The most striking feature of this eruption
was the rapid and noiseless evolution of im-
mense volu mes of dust-charged steam . There
must have been a tremendous explosion to send
that vapor-column twelve or fifteen thousand
feet into the air ; but, if so, it took place far
down in the depths of the earth, because I
did not hear a sound of any kind until light-
ning began to flash in the cloud over the cra-
130
ACIER— THE CALEBASSE ROAD
ter. The projectile force of the outburst was
not so great, apparently, as in the eruption
of Monday night. The cloud-canopy formed
by the mushrooming out of the ascending
vapor-column did not extend more than five
or six miles on the windward side of the cra-
ter ; there was no stellar lightning ; no ashes
or lapilli fell at Acier ; and I could not see,
through a strong glass, anything that looked
like an ejection of stones. It was simply
a tremendous uprush of steam densely
charged with fine particles of pulverized
rock.
The vapor that is thrown out of the main
crater of Mont Pelee varies greatly from day
to day, and sometimes from hour to hour,
not only in density, but in color, form, and
general appearance. In its varying aspects
it may be described as follows :
I . The vapor of quiescence — a slowly as-
cending column of pure white steam which
has neither sharp, clearly defined outlines,
nor pufF-like convolutions, and which sug-
gests steam rising from the hot water of a
geyser-basin, or from the escape-pipe of a
big ocean steamer.
131
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
2. The vapor of moderate activity — b. col-
umn of greater density and somewhat darker
color, which rolls and unfolds a little as it
rises, and looks like steam mixed with brown-
ish or yellowish smoke from a chimney of a
manufactory.
3. The vapor of dangerous activity — a
sharply defined, dark-yellow column of what
appears to be liquid mud, which boils out of
the volcano in huge rounded masses, swelling
and evolving in immense convolutions as it
rises — one gigantic mud-bubble breaking up
out of another in turn — until over the crater
there stands a solid opaque pillar of boiling,
unfolding, evolving mud-vapor, five hundred
feet in diameter and eight or ten thousand
feet in height.
4. Thevapor of great eruptions — astraight-
sided shaft of very black smoke, which shoots
up out of the crater with tremendous velocity,
like the smoke of a colossal piece of artillery
fired heavenward. This shaft goes to a height
of fifteen or twenty thousand feet, and then
miishrooms out laterally so as to cover a
circle fifty miles or more in diameter with a
volcanic canopy which is as dark as the black-
131
THE NEW YORK
PUBLIC LIBRARY
ACIER— THE CALEBASSE ROAD
est thunder-cloud and which shuts out the
light of day like a total eclipse. The pro-
jectile force, in eruptions of this kind, is so
great that it throws the black vapor far above
the influence of the trade-wind, and the ad-
vancing edge of the volcanic mantle moves
swiftly eastward, two miles or more above
the fleecy trade-wind clouds that are drifting
in the opposite direction.
It would be natural enough, perhaps, to
suppose that the volcano, in its varying phases
of activity, throws out vapor of diflTerent
kinds — at one. time pure white steam, at an-
other time steam mixed with smoke, and in
a great eruption inky-black smoke of the
sootiest kind ; but such is not the case. A
volcano never emits true smoke — that is, air
laden with particles of unconsumed carbon —
at any time ; and ninety-nine per cent, of the
vapor that rises from Mont Pelee is pure
steam. When this steam is wholly free from
solid matter, it looks white ; but as it be-
comes more and more heavily charged with
the fine dust of pulverized rock, it acquires
greater and greater apparent density, and
changes its color from pure white to yellow-
»33
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
ish-white, then to a dark muddy-yellow, and
finally to brownish-black and the deep threat-
ening black of a hurricane or tornado cloud.
The form as well as the rate of movement of
the ascending vapor-column seems to depend
upon the manner in which the steam makes
its escape from the hot interior of the vol-
cano and the projectile force of the subter-
ranean explosions. The finely divided mat-
ter which gives density and color to the col-
umn of steam is volcanic dust — z grayish
powder, like Portland cement, which is noth-
ing more nor less than rock that has beenv
ground up in the vast subterranean mortar
of the volcano, or, as seems more likely,
blown into minute fragments by the expan-
sive force of hot aqueous vapor suddenly re-
leased from immense pressure. In describ-
ing Mont Pelee and the results of its activity,
I have sometimes used, and may continue to
use, the words " smoke '* and " ashes ;" but
it must steadily be borne in mind that the
volcano ejects neither the one nor the other.
What looks like smoke is steam charged
with dust, and the dust which ' looks like
ashes is powdered rock.
134
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
fled in the direction of the Carbet peaks.
What happened to them afterward he did
not know ; but he heard from some of the
natives that they returned to Fort de France
the next day on foot.
Tuesday noon another American corre-
spondent, named Kavanaugh, came into
Morne Rouge from the south on horseback,
and, shortly after lunch, made an attempt to
ascend the volcano alone. He came back in
a state of complete exhaustion about three
hours later, and after the eruption on Wednes-
day morning he also returned to Fort de
France. How high he had succeeded in get-
ting on the mountain. Father Mary could
not tell us. Mr. Robert T. Hill, of the
United States Geological Survey, started for
Morne Rouge with Kavanaugh, but for some
reason failed to get through, and the cure
understood that he had gone back. We were
very sorry to miss seeing all these Americans,
and especially Mr. Hill, who had come to
Martinique with us on the Dixie; but it
was some satisfaction to feel that although
we, too, had been stampeded by the night
eruption of the 26 th, we were still in the field.
136
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
about two thousand feet we were caught in a
heavy shower, which so softened and loosened
up the ashes as to make the walking difficult
and tiresome.
The scenery, as we approached the top of
the long arete, became extremely wild,
gloomy, and desolate. The mountain slopes
were covered to a depth of a foot or more
with gray ashes ; the trees in all the ravines
at our left were bare and apparently dead ;
the leafless bushes that bordered the path had
been so broken and matted down by ashes,
cinders, and heavy rain that our guide fre-
quently had to cut a way through them with
his machete, and over the whole mountain was
the stillness of universal death. I saw no
living thing except a solitary land-crab, which
seemed to be making its way down out of
that region of fire, floods, lightning, ashes,
and Plutonian desolation.
Quiescent as the volcano had seemed
when we left Morne Rouge, it did not fail
to give us, at intervals, indications and re-
minders of its eruptive capabilities. Just
before we reached the huge black knob that
breaks the symmetrical slope of the mountain
138
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL6E
they had first been swept by fire and then
half buried by a heavy sleet-storm of wet
ashes.
A walk of five minutes more brought us
to the highest part of the Calebasse ; and
stopping suddenly on the brink of a preci-
pice, we looked down into the wild, gloomy,
unearthly gorge of the Falaise — a chaos of
tremendous cliflFs, landslides, enormous vol-
canic bowlders, blackened forests, and narrow
eroded channels, hundreds of feet in depth,
through which were tumbling torrents of
steaming water or hot mud. A great cloud
of yellowish-brown smoke was rising from
the crater, a thousand feet below, and all up
and down the bottom of the gorge we could
see uprushes of steam from fumaroles or
from water coming into contact with masses
of hot volcanic material that had suddenly
caved away from the precipitous bank and
fallen into the stream.
The distinctive characteristic of the whole
scene was its absolute unearthliness. The
wildness and ruggedness of the contours ;
the absence of all colors except white, gray,
and black ; the sudden and mysterious up-
140
i
\ '»
ACIER — THE CALEBASSE ROAD
rushes of steam or smoke ; the faint haze of
falling dust; the storm-clouds that eddied
around us and deepened the gloominess of
the gorge ; the drifts of volcanic ^shes in the
foreground, and the immense gray mass of
the mountain, rising to unknown heights in
the thick mist overhead, made up a picture
that had no parallel in my experience. It
might have been a scene from a Dantesque
Inferno, or a glimpse of another planet in
one of the formative stages of development,
but it was like nothing terrestrial.
We felt more than half inclined to de-
scend into the gorge and see what the
Falaise crater was actually doing ; but the
weather looked very threatening ; a sudden
roaring sound from the steaming abyss below
warned us that it was by no means a safe
place to be during an eruption — or even in
a severe storm — and we finally decided to
call it a day's work and return to Morne
Rouge. The whole summit of the volcano
was enveloped in dense clouds, so that
there was no possibility of reaching the
main crater that afternoon, even if we
were prepared to attempt it. It was still a
141
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
thousand feet above us, and nearly a mile
away.
I wrote a brief record of our ascent, and
placed it in the cleft of a split pole, which I
planted in the ashes at the highest point
reached on the Calebasse divide, and, after
taking one more look at the gloomy gorge,
we started homeward. Another heavy
tropical rain-storm caught us on our way
down, but we fortunately had no streams to
cross, and reached Morne Rouge in safety
about three o'clock. We found the parish
house filled with the pungent smell of phe-
nic acid, which Father Mary said he had
sprinkled over the floor to counteract or
overpower a faint odor of dead bodies that
came up from the valley of the Roxelane.
Early in the evening the clouds broke away
from the top of the volcano ; a faint glow of
subterranean fire lighted up the vapor-col-
umn over the main crater, and we heard two
or three rumbling detonations, but nothing
happened. About nine o'clock a vessel
somewhere off St. Pierre — probably a French
cruiser — threw a powerful searchlight on the
mountain, and illuminated the summit so that
142
ACIER— THE CALEBASSE ROAD
we could disrincdy see the V-shaped gorge
just below the crater on the southwestern
side, and even the movements of the smoke
as it rolled up and drifted away on the light
trade-wind in the direction of Precheur.
Then the piercing shaft of radiance swept
down the mud-slope of the Riviere Blanche
to the site of the Guerin sugar-mill, shifted
to the ruins of St. Pierre, and finally vanished,
leaving the mountain dark as before.
H3
VII
CLIMBING THE VOLCANO
MONT PELfiE showed no signs
of dangerous activity Saturday
morning, and, as we had done all
that we expected to do at M orne Rouge, we
decided to return to Acier and make an
attempt to reach the main crater by way of
the Morne Balais arete, which all the natives
said was a better and easier route than that
up the Calebasse. After taking a photograph
of Father Mary — one of the bravest and
most devoted priests in all Martinique — we
bade him good-by, climbed into our car-
riage, and started down the long, sinuous
road that leads to the valley of the Capot.
At the mouth of the Falaise gorge we found
that the high stone bridge over the stream had
144
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
cer's feeling of apprehension, and we soon
had evidence to show that it was well founded.
Just after we passed Vive a torrent of hot
water rushed down the gorge into the Capot,
throwing up clouds of white steam along its
course for a distance of a mile and a half or
two miles.
We reached Acier soon after noon, and
learned, to our great surprise, that Pro-
fessor Angelo Heilprin, of Philadelphia, and
Mr. Leadbeater, a photographer from New
York, had arrived there during our absence,
and had started up the mountain that morn-
ing, by way of the Balais arete, with the in-
tention of reaching, if possible, the main cra-
ter. The top of the volcano, when we got
back to Acier, was completely enveloped in
clouds ; and as the afternoon wore away and
the mountain-climbers did not return, we
began to feel some anxiety with regard to
their safety. They made their appearance,
however, about five o'clock, and reported
that they had succeeded in reaching the sum-
mit, but had been overtaken there by a
severe thunder-storm, with sharp lightning
and dense blinding clouds, which prevented
146
CLIMBING THE VOLCANO
them from finding their way beyond the
eastern edge of what had been Lake Palmiste
— ^. small pond that once occupied the bed
of an ancient crater. There, at a height of
about four thousand feet, they sat down
among the volcanic bowlders, in a pouring
rain, and waited three-quarters of an hour
for a change of weather ; but as the storm
continued, and as there seemed to be little
prospect of locating or reaching the new
crater that afternoon, they finally abandoned
the attempt to find it, and came down the
mountain in a tropical deluge which set the
ashes sliding in every direction and threat-
ened, at times, to sweep them oflF the narrow
arete into the gorge of the Falaise.
At a consultation which we held while sit-
ting in rocking-chairs out on the lawn that
evening, we decided that if the weather
should prove favorable we would make an-
other attempt to reach the summit crater on
the following day.
The morning of June i dawned perfectly
clear, and when we went out into the front
yard at five o'clock and looked at the vol-
cano, we could see nothing whatever to indi-
147
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
cate dangerous activity. The upper slopes
of the mountain were cloudless ; everything
was quiet in the gorge of the Falaise ; and
the column of vapor which was rising slowly
from the main crater seemed to consist
wholly of pure white steam. Mademoiselle
Marie, who was never absent when her pres-
ence was needful, and never idle when she
could do anything for our comfort, roused
the servants at half-past four, attended to
the preparation of an early breakfast and
packed a generous basket of luncheon to be
taken with us up the mountain. At six
o'clock we drove in carriages to Vive, mount-
ed saddle-mules that had been provided by
Mr. Chancel, and rode away across the
Capot bridge in the direction of Morne
Balais.
Although the arete that we intended to
climb was in plain sight from the valley of
the Capot, it was by no means easy of access.
The lower slopes of Mont Pelee on the
Vive side were intersected by deep barrancas,
cut in the mountain side by intermittent
torrents, and were covered, moreover, by a
dense growth of uncut sugar-cane. The
148
r •
r)
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
be moderate. Before I had ascended a thou-
sand feet I was dripping with perspiration
and panting for breath, and had to shout to
the water-boy to bring me a drink.
While I rested and recovered my breath, I
had an opportunity to look about me and
enjoy one of the most beautiful views in
Martinique. The whole eastern coast of the
island was in sight, from the promontory of
Basse Pointe to the long, irregular peninsula
that juts out into the ocean at Trinite. On the
south we could see the steeple of the Morne
Rouge church, Mont Calvary with its colossal
crucifix, and the forest-clad peaks of Carbet ;
while far away to the northward rose the
misty outline of the island of Dominica, like
a faint purple silhouette on the margin of an
indigo-blue sea. The picturesque effect of
the distant view was greatly enhanced by
the utter desolation of the immediate fore-
ground. At our left was the wild, chaotic
gorge of the Falaise, in which there was not
a sign of life nor a suggestion of color other
than leaden gray ; while beyond it we looked
into the broad fertile valley of Champ Flore,
where everything was vividly green, and
IS©
CLIMBING THE VOLCANO
where the scattered clumps of mango trees
and cocoanut palms were linked together by
silvery streams running through verdant
fields of young sugar-cane to the Capot.
Around and above us we could see only
bare gray slopes, covered with ashes, cinders
and volcanic stones ; but far away to the
eastward were the green buttresses of Morne
Jacob, the red roofs of Grande Anse and
Marigot, the costal fringe of snowy surf, and
the deep-blue plain of the ocean, whose
boundary line seemed to be halfway up the
sky.
When I stopped to rest, Mr. Varian, who
seemed to be the strongest and most ener-
getic climber in the party, was six or eight
hundred feet above me, and Prof Heilprin,
with Mr. Jaccaci and three or four porters,
was about as far below. In a few moments
Heilprin joined me and said that Jaccaci was
suffering from temporary dizziness. At a
height of about 2,800 feet, where the arete
narrowed to a rather sharp edge, with a
profoundly deep gorge on either side, he had
been attacked by mountain sickness with
vertigo, and had been forced to stop. We
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
sent one of the porters back to him with a
bottle of Mr. Clerc's " cyclone " wine, and
went on up the mountain — thinking that he
would feel better in a few moments and fol-
low us ; but he did not recover from the
dizziness and had to return. I think I should
have been tempted to give it up and return
myself, if Mr. Hqilprin, who is an expe-
rienced mountaineer, had not encouraged
me and shown me how to climb. There
happened that day to be little or no breeze ;
the heat on the bare, desolate ash-slope was
simply prostrating ; and as a result of trying
to climb too rapidly I felt as if I were going
to have a sunstroke. Professor Heilprin,
however, insisted that I would get up all
right if I would only go slowly. " Take it
easy ! Take it easy, Mr. Kennan 1" he
shouted every five minutes. " WeVe got
all day before us. Don't get overheated.
Stop every ten steps and rest. One of the
first things that my Alpine guides taught me
was to climb slowly." I finally did climb
slowly and began to feel better.
Clouds gathered about the mountain as
we approached the summit, and when we
isa
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
rents of water that rush into the ravines and
deeply eroded channels of the volcano during
heavy storms loosen up the ashes and set
them sliding in every direction ; and if a man
should lose his bearings in the clouds and
start down an arete leading into the precipi-
tous gorge of the Falaise, he could not pos-
sibly retrace his steps against the down-rush-
ing flood of mud and water, and would very
likely come to grief. I therefore picked out
a big, flat-topped bowlder at the head of the
Balais arete, and laid half a dozen stones
across the top of it in a line with Vive, so
that they might serve as a guide in case of
need.
As it was impossible to explore the moun-
tain top in a mist that hid everything from
sight at a distance of twenty feet, there
was nothing to do but wait patiently for a
change of weather. I was surprised to find
that on the very summit of the volcano
there were no ashes at all. The ground
seemed to be made up wholly of cinders and
sharp-edged rock-fragments which had evi-
dently been thrown out of the main crater
in recent eruptions. Some of the rock-
"54
CLIMBING THE VOLCANO
masses were large, many of them had been
completely calcined, and all showed the
effects of intense heat ; but I saw none that
had actually been fused, and of mud or lava
there was not a trace.
In fifteen or twenty minutes the clouds
blew away and the atmosphere cleared so
that we could see the whole outline of the
shallow oval basin that once held the water
of Lake Palmiste. It was perfectly dry ; its
bottom was covered with stones, cinders, and
ragged masses of volcanic rock ; and from
every square yard of it rose thin wisps of hot
vapor. The whole top of the mountain
oozed steam. Professor Heilprin got out
his pocket thermometer and found that the
temperature of the ground in a number of
places and at various depths ranged from
124^ to 162^ Fahrenheit. Directly opposite
the point where we stood, on the other side
of the lake-bed, rose a black pinnacle of rock
1 50 or 200 feet in height, which we took to
be Morne Lacroix. This was, and probably
still is, the highest peak of the volcano ; but
a part of it has been blown away, or has fallen
into the new crater at its base, so that the
155
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
remainder is merely a fragment of the ori^nal
morne.
One hundred and fifty or two hundred
yards away, near what seemed to be the
southwestern end of the lake-bed, there was
a gentle slope which rose twenty -five or thirty
feet to a sharp edge ; and just beyond this
edge was the ascending vapor-column of the
main crater. Picking our way carefully
among the big bowlders, we crossed the
lake-bed diagonally and walked up the gentle
slope to the sharp edge, at a point about
seventy-five feet north of the ascending col-
umn of steam. I expected, of course, to look
over that edge into the crater ; but I thought
that on the other side there would probably
be a gradual downward slope into something
like a huge circular bowl. I was tremen-
dously startled, therefore, to find myself sud-
denly on the very brink of a frightful chasm
fifty or seventy-five feet across and hun-
dreds of feet in depth, out of which came a
roar like that of a Titanic forge with the bel-
lows at work, and a curious crackling sound
which suggested the splitting of rocks in in-
tense heat. The wall of the chasm under
156
/
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
sure was a central cone of volcanic debris.
The height of the lake-bed, as shown by
Prof. Heilprin's aneroid, was 4,025 feet, and
the edge of the crater was probably 25 or
30 feet higher. We were unable to de-
termine with accuracy the trend of the crater-
fissure, owing to the derangement of our
compasses by the strong magnetic influence
of the volcano ; but it seemed to me that
the part of the chasm we saw ran nearly
north and south, curving to the westward at
the northern end, where it disappeared in a
cloud of steam.
We were all so overawed by the terrific
grandeur of the deep, roaring chasm that for
two or three minutes we stood on the brink
of it, motionless and silent. Then Professor
Heilprin shouted to me, " Oh, isn't it fine
to see these great operations of Nature ! "
"Yes," I replied, "but if you've seen all
you want to of this particular operation, I
would suggest that we get off this edge. It
looks to me as if it overhung, and it might
cave away and carry us all down into the
crater — it's nothing but cinders and stones."
I had hardly finished making this prudent
158
CLIMBING THE VOLCANO
suggestion when a great swirl of gray clouds
hid everything from sight, and we were
hardly able to find our way back through
the mist and steam to the big white bowlder
at the head of the arete where we had left
our coats, luncheon, and water-bottles. We
remained on the summit fifteen or twenty
minutes longer, hoping that it would clear
up enough to give us another view of the
crater-chasm ; but while we were eating our
luncheon the clouds grew denser and darker,
and, fearing that we should be caught on the
summit in a thunder-storm, we hastily
started downward. Rain began to fall a few
moments later, and we had hardly crossed
the narrow, dangerous part of the arete when
it was flooded by the worst storm that we
experienced in Martinique. Water fell from
the low-hanging clouds in sheets ; and when
we reached the half-deserted village near the
foot of the arete, Professor Heilprin sought
shelter. As we were already drenched to the
skin, Varian and I rode on ; but we were
soon stopped by an impassable torrent in
one of the deep barrancas. We then returned
to the village and separated, Varian going
159
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
in search of Professor Heilprin, while I took
refuge in an empty shack by the roadside.
Rain fell for an hour and a half in blinding
sheets, with vivid lightning and heavy thun-
der, and muddy water rushed through the
lower part of the village in such raging tor-
rents that I more than half expected to be
overwhelmed by a Basse Pointe flood. I
could neither get down to Vive nor back to
the part of the village where Heilprin and
Varian were. I tried once to rejoin them,
but was stopped by a chocolate-colored cat-
aract that would have carried away a house.
Returning to my shack, I practiced calis-
thenics at intervals for an hour or more to
counteract the chill of my wet clothing. By
that time the storm had abated, and as soon
as the flood-water ran off so that I could
pass the cataract, I went in search of Heil-
prin and Varian. I found them sitting with
half a dozen of our negro porters and guides
in a wretched little eight-by-ten cabin near
the highest part of the settlement. The na-
tive who owned the shack mixed for me a
refreshing drink of lime-juice, sugar-syrup
and rum, and we sat there discussing Mar-
i6o
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
the deserted shacks of the village near the
foot of the arete, and had begun the ascent
from there at daybreak, we should have had
a clear atmosphere on the summit for two
or three hours, and should probably have
been able to make something like an accu-
rate survey of the main crater.
162
VIII
THE WESTERN SLOPE OF
MONT PELEE
ON the 2d of June, Mr. Jaccaci, Mr.
Varian, and I decided to return to
Fort de France. We had made as
thorough an examination of Mont Pelee as
it was possible to make on the eastern side,
and it seemed to us that the best thing to do
next would be to charter a tug or vessel of
some sort in Fort de France and cruise along
the base of the volcano from Carbet to
Grande Riviere, or Macouba, stopping at
St. Pierre, Precheur, and other points of in-
terest on our way back. Professor Heilprin
and Mr. Leadbeater, who had not yet vis-
ited Morne Rouge, wanted to go there for
a day, but they promised to rejoin us on
Wednesday in Fort de France and go with
us up the western coast.
163
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfeE
We left Acier about nine o'clock, and
found the seacoast road full of fugitives, as
usual; but they were not all bound in the
same direction. Nearly half of them were
apparently on their way back to their homes
in Morne Rouge, Ajoupa Bouillon, and
Macouba. For more than a month, after
Mont Pelee began to be active in May, the
whole population of Northern Martinique
lived an anxious, restless, migratory life.
Every time there was an eruption — or even
an unusual boiling out of vapor from the main
crater — hundreds of families living on the
flanks of the volcano, or around its base,
caught up hurriedly such household gdods
and utensils and such supplies of food as
they could carry on their heads, and fled to
a distance of five, ten, or fifteen miles, accord-
ing to the intensity of their fear. Then,
when the volcano quieted down, they gradu-
ally straggled back to their homes, only to
be driven away again by a fresh outburst
Old women who could hardly hobble along
with a cane, cripples, mothers with young
babies in their arms, and children only five
or six years of age walked three or four
164
\
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfeE
time, whether we should get anywhere before
morning. About half-past nine, however,
we saw the twinkle of lights ahead, and
twenty minutes later we entered the quiet
village of St. Joseph. As there was no hotel
in the place, we hardly knew where to seek
shelter ; but at the suggestion of two French
gentlemen, who happened to be standing on
the street and who volunteered to accompany
us, we drove to the house of the cure.
Father Jourdan had already gone to bed;
but he got up at once, gave us a most cor-
dial welcome, invited the two French gentle-
men to come in, had supper prepared, and
in half an hour we were all sitting around a
small dining-table discussing Mont Pclce —
the one absorbing topic of conversation in all
Martinique.
After a comfortable and refreshing night's
rest and a good breakfast, we started again for
Fort de France ; drove into the city about
eleven o'clock, and received a hearty greet-
ing from Consul Ayme, who was beginning
to feel some anxiety with regard to our safety.
We had been absent twelve days, and it was
feared that something might have happened
1 66
WESTERN SLOPE OF MONT PEL^E
to us in the eruptions of May 26 and 28.
Professor Heilprin and Mr. Leadbeater came
in from Morne Rouge Tuesday evening,
June 3, and early on the morning of the 5th,
having chartered the tug Rubis at five hun-
dred francs per day, we steamed out of the
harbor and up the western coast of the
island.
In approaching St. Pierre by water from
Fort de France, the first noticeable signs of
volcanic activity appear at the village of Car-
bet, which is situated about a mile and a half
south of the city, on the margin of a gently
rounded cape. The eastern edge of the vol-
canic hurricane of May 8 just touched this
settlement, scorching the cocoanut trees and
setting fire to a few houses at its northern
end, but leaving intact the central and south-
ern parts of the village, which were protected
to some extent by high intervening bluflTs.
Trees standing on the hills behind Carbet
and between it and St. Pierre show that the
radiating, fan-shaped blast from the volcano
extended eastward just far enough to sweep
the city, and that a slight change in its direc-
tion would have made all the diflference be-
167
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
tween life and death to more than thirty
thousand people. The advancing front of
the hurricane, where it struck the ocean,
probably had a width of about four miles;
and St. Pierre was half or three-quarters of a
mile inside of its eastern boundary line.
As we rounded the high cape of Carbet
our field of view widened to the northward
so as to include the whole gray, desolate
slope of the volcano, from St. Pierre to Pre-
cheur, and from the dark-blue ocean to the
broken trade-wind clouds that just drifted
across the summit. At first sight and from
that distance it looked like a sloping, fan-
shaped plain of mud and ashes which had
been cut into deep valleys, ravines, and
gorges by raging torrents poured out of a
wide, V-shaped cleft just under the main
crater. Of the great forests that once clothed
the upper part of the slope there remained
not a trace. They had either been carried
down by torrents and landslides or torn to
pieces by volcanic hurricanes, and then
buried under seventy-five or a hundred feet
of ashes and mud. On the hills back of St
Pierre there were still a few branchless trees,
1 68
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
La Mare, just south of Precheur, to the north-
ern end of Sl Pierre. Within the triangle
that would be bounded by lines drawn
through these points there is absolutely noth-
ing except mud, ashes, steam, water, and
stones. Every tree, every house, and every
sign of vegetation has disappeared. Although
for a distance of a mile or two outside of these
limits crops have been ruined and trees have
been denuded of their foliage by showers of
ashes or muddy rain, the crops and the trees are
still there, while inside of the triangle there is
not a trace nor a vestige of life.
As we steamed northward, beyond Pre-
cheur, blasted trees and withered vegetation
became less and less noticeable ; the moun-
tain slopes changed in tint from ash-gray to
brown and finally to dark green, and after
we passed Pearl Rock, about three miles
north of Precheur, I should not have known,
from the color of the foliage or the general
appearance of the landscape, that there was
an active volcano on the island. We were
nearer to the main crater than we had been
at Vive ; but the deposit of ashes on this part
of the coast seemed to be much thinner than
170
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
As we came out from under the shelter of
the land off Grande Riviere we met a heavy
swell raised by the fresh northeast trade-
wind ; and as we did not care to attempt a
landing in the surf that was rolling on the
beach, we put about just beyond Macouba,
ran back to Precheur, and went ashore there
to see what damage had been done by the
great flood that rushed down on the town
through the valley of the Precheur River.
The first thing that attracted our attention,
as we stepped upon the beach, was the great
quantity of volcanic dust which covered the
ground, incrusted with a thin gray plaster
the walls of the abandoned houses, and lay,
here and there, in deep, half-compacted
drifts, along the empty streets. Much of
this dust had, doubtless, been washed down
from the mountain slopes by torrential
rains ; but hundreds of tons of it must have
fallen, like snow, from above. The steady
trade-wind had been carrying the vapor from
Mont Pelee directly over Precheur, day after
day, for weeks ; and as that vapor was almost
always charged with dust, even when the
volcano was not in active eruption, there
172
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
seemed to be pouring down upon them
from some great fissure in the mountain-side,
thousands of feet above their heads.
Near the centre of the little town we found,
in a rather large wooden building overlooking
the sea, the hall of the " Societe de Secours
Mutuel: L' Union des Dames," which had
been used, apparently, as a place of recre-
ation, instruction, and assembly. There were
blackboards on two sides of the room, check-
ers and dice were still lying on the tables,
framed copies of the by-laws of the society
and lists of active and honorary members had
been tacked against the wall between cheap
chromo-lithographs of the Emperor and Em-
press of Russia, and from the ceiling hung
scraps of ribbon and colored Japanese lanterns
that had been used, apparently, to decorate
the hall for some recent festivity. Everything
was gray with dust, which had blown in at the
open windows, and the furniture was all in
disorder, as if some one had rushed in hur-
riedly and ransacked the place in an attempt
to save everything of value that could be car-
ried away.
The greater part of the town seemed to
«74
THE TRAGEDY OF PELl&E
feet long by ten or twelve feet in thickness,
and must have contained at least twenty-five
hundred cubic feet. When these colossal
masses of rock came down that ravine in a
flood that would have swept away and de-
stroyed a battle-ship, the roar must have been
like that of Niagara, and I do not wonder
that the terrified inhabitants of Precheur
fled.
Until the slopes of the volcano above the
town shall have been carefully examined, it
will be impossible to say with certainty where
this deluge of water came from ; but I am of
opinion that it was nothing more than a cloud-
burst, due mainly to the sudden condensation
and precipitation of immense quantities of
volcanic steam. Professor Palmieri, of the
University of Naples, says that great erup-
tions of Vesuvius were almost always followed
by heavy storms of rain, which descended in
muddy torrents, and caused as much damage
as the lava itself. Sir Archibald Geikie, too,
asserts that " the destructive torrents so fre-
quently observed to form part of the phe-
nomena of great volcanic explosions " are due,
chiefly, to " the condensation of the vast
X76
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
activity in two or three days. The summit-
crater was smoking as usual, the front of the
mud-glacier was steaming a little as it pushed
down into the sea, and small jets or clouds of
vapor were rising in half a dozen places from
the hot, bare slope ; but the sub-crater in the
valley of the Riviere Blanche was absolutely
quiet, and the volcano^ as a whole, seemed to
be taking a rest. I watched the shore party
as they landed from the small boat, and saw
them walk three or four hundred yards up
the river in the direction of a steaming fuma-
role. Then I lost sight of them for a few
moments as they went down, apparently, into
the bed of the stream. Five minutes later my
attention was attracted to a white cloud of
pure steam which came racing down the upper
gorge of the Riviere Blanche as if it were
rising from a swiftly advancing torrent of
boiling water. It looked dangerous, and I
wanted to shout a warning to the party ashore ;
but they were still out of sight and my voice
would not carry half the distance. In a mo-
ment, however, they reappeared, and I saw
that they had taken alarm and were running
for the boat. They had hardly reached it
178
WESTERN SLOPE OF MONT PELEE
when dense mud-smoke made its appearance
in the high V-shaped gorge near the summit
of the mountain and began to boil out of the
upper valley of the Riviere Blanche. Two
or three minutes later, before they had had
time to get more than a hundred feet from the
dangerous coast, there was a sudden and tre-
mendous explosion from both craters, and an
enormous mass of dark yellow vapor was pro-
jected upward in rolling, expanding convolu-
tions, not only from the craters themselves,
but apparently from the entire length of the
fissure that united them. Then, from the
lower crater, a huge cloud seemed to roll
slowly down the slope in the direction of the
boat, and the whole western face of the vol-
cano burst into the most terrifying activity.
A flood of boiling water, with a wave-front
eight or ten feet high, rushed down the
Riviere Blanche and precipitated itself into the
sea with a great hissing and steaming ; explo-
sions in half a dozen different places sent big,
fountain-like jets of white vapor to heights
of two or three hundred feet ; geysers of
liquid mud leaped into the air through the
clouds of steam that suddenly began to rise
179
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
from the lower slopes ; and the tremendous
column of mud-smoke from the crater of the
Riviere Blanche boiled .up to a height of
more than half a mile and then began to open
out in huge, cauliflower-like heads.
The captain of the Rubis rang the bell for
full speed ahead and ran directly out to sea,
regardless of the men in the small boat, who
were making frantic efforts to get away from
the coast. I tapped him on the shoulder and
said, " You must go back for the boat." He
shook his head, and pointing at the really
frightful- looking vapor-column over the lower
crater said, " Bad ! Ver' bad ! "
" Yes," I said, " of course it's bad ; but
you've got to go back for that boat."
He kept on his course two or three min-
utes longer, and then, having had time to
think a little, threw the wheel hard-a-star-
board, came round in a big circle, and ran
back toward the land. In five minutes more
we had the shore party safely on board and
were again running out to sea. Mr. Jaccaci
wiped his perspiring face, gazed for a moment
in silence at the volcano, which was then al-
most hidden in smoke, steam and falling
1 80
if
1
TH^NEV/ YORK
^UBUC UBRAKY
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
sudden torrents with a high wave-front was,
perhaps, due to the formation and rupture
of big dams. The sides of the gorges and
ravines above the lower crater were very
steep, and avalanches of ashes might slide
off them and block up the channel of the
stream below, so as to dam the water back
and form a large pond. Sooner or later the
increasing volume of water would burst the
dam, and the whole mass would rush steam-
ing down to the sea in a big flood. Then,
too, the channels of these streams were
deeply eroded in a mass of loose, incoherent
volcanic ejectamenta, and dams may have
been formed frequently by the undercutting
of the stream and the caving away of the
undermined banks. It seems to me more
reasonable, on the whole, to explain the
intermittent floods in this way than to sup-
pose that the lower crater was throwing out
hot water every fifteen minutes or half an
hour.
We cruised or drifted oflT the mouth of
the Riviere Blanche for several hours, and
saw another eruption from the lower crater
which threw a huge column of mud-smoke
i8ft
WESTERN SLOPE OF MONT PEL^E
to a height of four or five thousand feet. It
had a very menacing and terrifying appear-
ance, but as the direction of the discharge was
upward, and the rain of ashes that fell from
it struck the ocean north of us, in the vicin-
ity of Precheur, we felt less apprehension
than at the time of the first eruption, when
we were nearer the coast. If we could have
foreseen, however, what was about to happen
on that side of the volcano, we should have
watched these outbursts with a feeling of
much greater anxiety and dread.
At ten o'clock the next morning, when the
French cable steamer Pouyer Quertier was
grappling for a broken cable about five miles
off the mouth of the Riviere Blanche, there
was an eruption of tremendous violence,
which threw up a vapor-column that mush-
roomed to a width of fifty miles, and covered
the whole island with the darkness of a total
eclipse. At the same time a black hurricane-
cloud, precisely like the one that destroyed
St. Pierre, burst out of the mountain-side,
swept over the place where we were drifting
the previous afternoon, and went five miles
to sea, covering the Pouyer Quertier with
183
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
ashes and small stones, and overwhelming
four or five natives who happened to be
passing in small boats on their way to Pre-
cheur. If we had happened to go up the
western coast Friday instead of Thursday,
our volcano investigations would probably
have come to an end, because at ten o'clock
our tug was lying close to the mouth of the
Riviere Blanche, directly in the track of the
tornado blast, and Heilprin, Jaccaci, and
Varian were just going ashore.
184
IX
THE WRECKED CITY
FROM the mouth of the Riviere Blanche
we ran down to St. Pierre and landed
on the slope of the Place Bertin,
nearly opposite the ruins of the old cathedral.
The site of the city was a crescent-shaped
strip of land, about a mile in length and four
hundred yards in extreme width, lying be-
tween the curve of the ocean beach and the
corresponding curve of a very steep ridge or
hill. At the northern end of the crescent was
the Riviere des Peres, backed by the im-
mense green slope of Mont Pelee, and at the
southern end, on a high rocky promontory,
stood the Morne d'Orange Battery and the
colossal white statue of the Virgin Mary.
The ridge or hill which formed the back of
185
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
the crescent, and which half inclosed the city
on that side, was originally covered with grass,
flowering shrubs, and festoons of hanging
vines ; and it must have made a beautiful
green background for the mass of gabled, red-
roofed houses which rose toward it in undu-
lating slopes and irregular terraced lines from
the curving margin of the dark-blue sea.
The principal street of the city was the Rue
Victor Hugo, which ran from one end of the
crescent to the other, and which was crossed
at intervals by shorter streets leading up from
the ocean to the face of the high and partly
terraced ridge. The buildings were generally
two or three stories in height, and their walls
were almost invariably made of rubble laid up
in cement and faced with plaster or stucco.
Although these walls were often three feet in
thickness, they had comparatively little struc-
tural strength or resisting power, owing to the
fact that they were composed of rounded
stones, and were held together by a rather
friable pouzzolane of volcanic tuff. They
crumbled and fell, therefore, much more eas-
ily than if they had been made of rectangular
blocks with a binding of good mortar or
i86
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
a tranquil, indigo-blue sea. After the catas-
trophe, it was a wrecked, ruined city of the
dead, wrapped in a gray winding-sheet of
volcanic ashes.
The first impression that it made upon me
when I landed on the wreck-strewn beach of
the Place Bertin was one of loneliness, still-
ness, grayness, and almost unimaginable des-
olation. There was no color, no structural
form, no traceable plan, and no sign whatever
of recent life. Turning one's back to the
ocean and looking toward the bluff, across the
shattered walls and shapeless piles of ash-in-
crusted stones, one might have imagined that
he was looking at the ruins of a big pueblo in
an Arizona desert, which had been destroyed
by a frightful earthquake a hundred years
before. It was almost impossible to realize,
or even to believe, that, within a month, this
had been a bright, gay, beautiful city of thirty
thousand inhabitants. Here and there stood
gaunt, fire-scorched trunks of trees, from which
all branches had been torn away, and over
the brown face of the steep ridge hung leaf-
less remains of luxuriant vines ; but, with
these exceptions, there was nothing to indicate
i88
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
the chaos of wreckage, in almost any direc-
tion, over piles of rubble, sheets of metallic
roofing, steel braces or girders, masses of tree
branches, iron bedsteads, smashed roofing-tiles,
tangled telephone wire, burst-open safes and
great mounds of ash-plastered building-stones,
blocking up and almost obliterating the nar-
row streets. Even if I had been perfectly
familiar with the city, I should have had great
difficulty in finding my way about ; and with-
out such familiarity I could not orient myself
at all. It was often impossible for me to de-
termine whether I was in a street or in the
midst of a ruined block of buildings. Of
course, in a city that has been so completely
wrecked there is little to describe. One can
only say that it is a chaotic mass of rubble,
plaster, roofing-tiles and shattered walls, with
here and there the fire-scorched branchless
trunk of a big tree.
With a view to ascertaining, if possible, the
source and direction of the hurricane that
caused this unparalleled destruction, I made
a careful examination of standing walls and
fallen trees. The highest walls were gener-
ally those that ran north and south and the
190
THE TRAGEDY OF PELJ&E
a little and fired, the projectiles from them
would go over or into the V-shaped notch, or
amphitheater, just below the main crater.
From that point, or near that point, must
have come, therefore, the blast that pros-
trated them.
I was able to make some observations also
that have a more or less direct bearing upon
the temperature of the blast and its dura-
tion. In all parts of the city, and particu-
larly at its southern end, there were quanti-
ties of wooden wreckage, in the shape of
beams, planks, barrels, and fragments of
roofing, that had not been burned, nor even
singed. The trunks of green trees showed
no traces of fire, unless they had happened
to stand where they were scorched or ignited
by the heat of burning buildings. Bunches
of dry grass on the Morne d' Orange had
been burned nearly to the ground ; but the
delicate twigs of living trees and bushes in
the same locality were apparently uninjured.
The blast was hot enough to destroy human
life and to set fire to objects of a particularly
inflammable nature ; but it was not hot
enough, or did not last long enough, to kill
192
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
the catastrophe, says that the bodies of the
dead were generally distorted and had the
color of burned coffee. Most of them lay
in the streets, where they had been subjected
to the heat of burning buildings, and it was
impossible to determine, by mere inspection,
whether the condition in which they were
found was due to the blast or to the subse-
quent conflagration. In some cases all cloth-
ing had been burned or torn off, while in
others underclothing and corsets remained.
Light outer garments were invariably gone.
A very large number of bodies had burst at
the abdomen;* all spongy, cellular tissues
were greatly distended, and many skulls had
parted at the sutures, without any indication
of external injury. As decomposition, at
that time, had hardly begun, Mr. Parravicino
thinks that these efl^ects were not due to that
cause. They suggested rather a sudden re-
moval of atmospheric pressure, brought
* The photog^ph of a man under the branches of a tam-
arind tree, which was taken by direction of Vicar-General
Parel (^Century Magazine, August, 1902, p. 615) and which
has been reproduced by many American newspapers, shows
this effect.
194
THE WRECKED CITY
about in some way by the blast. The fact
that many bodies were found in this condi-
tion seems to me worthy of record, inasmuch
as it rests upon the testimony of two un-
usually intelligent and observant men — Mr.
Parravicino and Major Mirville, chief phar-
macist of the Military Hospital at Fort de
France. It is greatly to be regretted that
the physicians and surgeons of Martinique
did not make a series of careful post-mortem
examinations immediately after the catastro-
phe. Many questions of scientific importance
might thus have been settled that must now
remain in doubt.
Evidences of the force of the volcanic
blast that destroyed the city presented them-
selves at almost every step. Rubble walls
three feet in thickness had been torn to
pieces as if made of dominoes or kinder-
garten blocks ; century-old trees had been
uprooted or stripped of all their branches ;
six-inch guns, nine or ten feet in length,
had been dismounted in the Morne d'Or-
ange Battery ; and the colossal statue of the
Virgin Mary, which weighed at least two
or three tons, had been blown off its pedestal
«95
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfeE
and carried to a distance of forty or fif^
feet. Such effects could hardly have beea
produced by a blast of lower velocity thtttt
hundred miles an hour. r . «
It is a remarkable fact that St. Herre wu
struck by two volcanic hurricanes of equal
severity— one occurring at 8.02 a.m. on the
8th of May, and the other about 5.15 A.if.
on the 20th. As we reached Fort de France
in the cruiser Dixie at 6 a.m. on the 21st, we
missed the second blast by exactly twenty-
four hours. If we had sailed from New York
one day earlier, we should have been just ofF
Mont Pelee when the second tornado-cloud
rolled down on the ill-fated city.
Photographs taken between May 8 and
May 20 show that the second blast must
have had quite as much energy as the first
Before the 20th, the walls of hundreds of
buildings in the central part of the city were
standing two and three stories high ; while
after that date there were very few that stood,
four-square, even as high as the top of the
first story. The blast of May 8 wrecked the
cathedral and threw down one of its twin
towers ; but all four walls of the othen as
196
TZ I
:\
THE TRAGEDY OF PELEE
a private dwelling. The buildings them-
selves had been razed to their foundation
stones.
Although the walls left standing, after the
blast of the 8th, had doubtless been weak-
ened, to some extent, by fire, they still had
the appearance of great solidity, and could
hardly have been overthrown by anything
less destructive than a second hurricane. An
earthquake might have demolished them,
but no earth tremors were noticed at Mome
Rouge or Fort de France, and no buildings
were injured outside the area swept by the
blast It seems almost certain, therefore,
that Mont Pelee fired two rounds at St. Pierre
from its gigantic volcanic gun, without chang-
ing the aim ; and that the second discharge
completed the work of destruction begun by
the first. Both eruptions were accompanied,
or immediately followed, by torrential rains
or cloud-bursts, and a deluge of water swept
immense quantities of volcanic dust down the
slopes of the mountain, in the shape of soft,
pasty mud. This mud filled the valley of
the Roxelane almost up to the floors of the
bridges, buried many houses out of sight at
198
THE WRECKED CITY
the northern end of St. Pierre, and rushed
into the sea so suddenly and in such enor-
mous volumes as to produce a series of
small tidal waves, which were observed and
measured at Fort de France.
At the time when we visited St. Pierre all
the bodies of the dead that could easily be
recovered had been collected and burned;
but thousands more lay buried in the ruins
of the houses, or under heaps of wreckage
and debris in the streets. They cannot be
removed without extensive excavation, and
they will doubtless lie there until only the
bones are left. I doubt very much whether,
in the lifetime of the present generation, any
attempt will be made to rebuild the city.
Wrecked towns are usually rebuilt by their
surviving inhabitants ; but St. Pierre has no
surviving inhabitants — its whole population
perished— and the impression made by the
great disaster upon the people of the island
was so deep, and the fear of the volcano is
now so intense, that no men of the present
generation are likely to make homes for
themselves in that fire-scorched, ash-buried
valley of death.
199
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
We wandered over the ruins of the wrecked
city for an hour and a half or two hours, and
were then driven by a heavy rain to the shel-
ter of the tug. As soon as the shower passed,
we ran up again to the mouth of the Riviere
Blanche, and watched the play of steam-jets
and mud-geysers on that side of the moun-
tain until the sun was low in the west. As
there were no more extraordinary manifesta-
tions of volcanic energy, and as we were all
tired, hungry and wet, we finally returned,
just before dark, to Fort de France.
200
THE DESTRUCTION OF
ST. PIERRE
IN previous chapters 1 have tried to de-
scribe, as fully and accurately as possi-
ble, the appearance and behavior of
Mont Pelee during the time that it was un-
der my observation. It is my purpose now
to give a brief account of the destruction of
St. Pierre ; to bring together and compare
the statements of a dozen or more persons
who witnessed the catastrophe ; and to make
an attempt, at least, to answer the questions,
" What happened ? In what way did it hap-
pen ? " and " What were the proximate causes
of the disaster ? "
Mont Pelee has been active only once be-
fore within historic times. On the 5th of
August, 1 851, it rumbled or thundered for a
SOI
THE TRAGEDY OF PELJ&E
few hours, and threw up a column of vapor
which sprinkled ashes over its southwestern
face from St. Pierre to Precheur; but the
eruption was neither violent nor destructive,
and soon subsided. A scientific commission,
which made a careful examination of the
mountain shortly afterward, found a few small
craterlets and hot springs near the source of
the Riviere Blanche, and a deep, narrow fissure
— since known as the Fente, or Terre Fen-
due — which seemed to cut the top of the
mountain into halves just west of Lake Palm-
iste ; but the area of disturbance was small
and the manifestations of activity were com-
paratively feeble. The Etang Sec, or Dry
Lake, was found to be situated a short dis-
tance east of the craterlets and hot springs,
at a height of 2,871 feet. Its basin, although
ordinarily dry, then contained five times as
much water as the basin of Lake Palmiste,
on the summit, and both lakes were thought
to be the bowls of ancient craters.
As the result of its examination, the com-
mission reported that the volcanic disturbance
had been confined to a small area in the upper
valley of the Riviere Blanche ; that there had
ftOl
DESTRUCTIpN OF ST. PIERRE
been no perceptible change in the configura-
tion of the mountain ; that the old craters,
fitang Sec and Lake Palmiste, were full of
water ; and that no danger was to be appre-
hended.
For half a century thereafter the volcano
remained quiescent ; and Lake Palmiste, the
basin of the ancient summit crater, became a
favorite place of resort for excursionists and
picnic parties from St. Pierre. The basin of
the Etang Sec was not so often visited, on ac-
count of its comparative inaccessibility, but
it could be seen from the heights above ; it
had been overgrown by vegetation and it was
generally dry.
The first signs of a renewal of volcanic ac-
tivity were observed in April of the present
year. M. Landes, professor of natural
sciences in the St. Pierre Lycee, noticed steam-
ing fumaroles in the upper valley of the
Riviere Blanche as early as April 2 ; but
there was nothing like an eruption until the
25th, when the volcano suddenly began to
smoke and throw out ashes. A party of in-
vestigators set out at once from St. Pierre,
and upon reaching the summit of Morne
203
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfeE
Lacroix — a pinnacle of the volcano which
overlooks Lake Palmiste on one side and the
£tang Sec on the other — discovered that the
basin of the Dry Lake was filling with water.
A few days later a larger party, consisting of
Mfessrs. Boulin, Waddy, Decord, Bouteuil,
Ange and Berte, ascended the mountain, by
way, apparently, of the Riviere Blanche,
and, after struggling for an hour through a
dense, tangled forest, came out on the very
brink of the Etang Sec basin. They found
it to be a gigantic bowl, half a mile in diam-
eter, with a lake at the bottom and a new
cinder-cone on one side of it near the eastern
wall. The trees around the bowl were cov-
ered with black volcanic dust, and there
was a film of floating cinders on the sur-
face of the water. No eruption from the
cinder-cone took place while the party was
watching it, but Messrs. Boulin and Berte be-
lieved it to be the source of the smoke and
ashes seen on the 25th. Professor Landes,
on the other hand, who climbed nearly to the
fitang Sec a few days later, thought that the
smoke rose from the Fente, or cleft, first
noticed by the scientific commission of 1852.
204
DESTRUCTION OF ST. PIERRE
All observers agreed that the manifestations
of activity were at the highest part of the vol-
cano, between the Etang Sec and Lake Palm-
iste, and no one appears to have noticed
anything that indicated a fissure in the gorge
of the Riviere Blanche, or an opening in the
place now occupied by the lower crater.
Vapor continued to rise from the volcano
at intervals on the 28th and 29th of April,
and on the 30th there were occasional detona-
tions and two or three slight earth-tremors.
On the 2d of May the inhabitants of Precheur
were frightened by a heavy and continuous
shower of ashes ; but the people of St. Pierre
were so little alarmed that they planned and ad-
vertised a popular excursion to the new crater,
to take place on Sunday, May 4. At 1 1.30
that night, however, there was a violent erup-
tion, accompanied by dense smoke, lightning
and terrifying detonations, and the country
people fled, from all parts of the mountain,
to Precheur, Morne Rouge and St. Pierre.
Ashes fell over the whole northern half of the
island from Grande Riviere to Fort de France,
and continued to fall on the western slope of
the volcano throughout Saturday, May 3.
205
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
The people of St. Pierre then began to take
alarm. The worshipers in the cathedral
became panic-stricken; all the schools and
many of the stores were closed ; the proposed
excursion to the crater was abandoned, and
there was a general feeling of anxiety and
apprehension.
The renewal of volcanic activity was ac-
companied by heavy rains on the summit of
the mountain, which filled up the colossal bowl
of the £^tang Sec and sent floods of ash-laden,
chocolate-colored water down the valleys of
all the rivers between St. Pierre and Precheur.
On the 5th of May, a little after noon, the
lower bank of the Etang Sec was blown out
by a volcanic explosion, or gave way under
the increased pressure of water, and the whole
lake suddenly rushed down the side of the
mountain, from a height of nearly three thou-
sand feet. In its fall it carried away trees,
immense rocks, and thousands of tons of
ashes, and by the time it reached the lower
slopes it had become an avalanche of liquid
ash-mud. Moving with the speed of an ex-
press train, it struck the big sugar-mill of
Guerin & Son, at the mouth of the Riviere
206
DESTRUCTION OF ST. PIERRE
Blanche ; swept it completely out of exist-
ence, with young Guerin and thirty other
persons ; and then plunged into the sea,
overwhelming and sinking two yachts that
were lying there at anchor, and raising a tidal
wave which flooded the lower streets of St.
Pierre and washed over all the beaches be-
tween Grande Riviere and Fort de France.
This catastrophe greatly alarmed the people
of St. Pierre, and they began to leave the city
at the rate of three hundred per day. Thou-
sands of fugitives, however, flocked in from
Precheur, Ste. Philomene, Morne Rouge
and other villages on the flanks of the vol-
cano, so that the population was increased
rather than diminished.
On the morning of the yth there was an-
other eruption, accompanied by lightning,
heavy explosions, and the appearance of in-
candescent matter at the edge of the summit-
fissure. This greatly increased the feeling of
apprehension in St. Pierre, and every boat
leaving for Fort de France that day was
crowded with fugitives. The local newspaper,
however {Les Colonies)^ deprecated the panic ;
declared that the alarm was not justified ; and
107
ELfi
THE TRAGEDY OF P
said, on the very eve of the catastrophe:
" Mont Pelee is no more td be feared by St.
Pierre than Vesuvius is feared by Naples.
We confess that we cannot understand this
panic. Where could one be better off than
at St. Pierre ? "
Some observers, however, who were famil-
iar with Vesuvius, took a different view. In the
roadstead off the city lay at anchor, that very
day, the Italian bark Orsolina, Captain Ma-
rino Leboffe, loading with sugar for Havre.
Alarmed by the threatening appearance of the
volcano. Captain Leboffe went to the shippers
and said to them that he did not regard that
roadstead as a safe place to be, and that he
had decided to stop loading and sail for
Havre.
" But," objected the shippers, " you can't
go yet; you haven't got half your cargo
aboard."
" That doesn't make any difference," re-
plied the captain ; "I'd rather sail with half
a cargo than run such a risk as a man must
run here."
The shippers assured him that Mont Pelee
was not dangerous ; that it had thrown out
208
DESTRUCTION OF ST. PIERRE
smoke and ashes in the same way once be-
fore, without doing any damage ; and that, in
all probability, it wouldn't remain active a
week. Even if it should, smoke and ashes
couldn't hurt anybody.
" I don't know anything about Mont Pe-
lee," said Captain LebofFe, " but if Vesuvius
were looking as your volcano looks this morn-
ing, I'd get out of Naples ; and I'm going to
get out of here."
The shippers then became angry and told
him that if he sailed without permission and
with only half a cargo, he would get no clear-
ance papers, and would be arrested as soon
as he reached Havre.
" All right ! " replied the imperturbable
captain. " I'll take my chance of arrest, but I
won't take any chances on that volcano. I'm
going to get my anchor up and make sail just
as soon as I get aboard." He bade them
good-by and left them. The shippers then
sent two customs officers to the bark, with
instructions to stay on board and prevent her
from leaving. The captain said to these
officers: " Gentlemen, I'm going to sail from
this port in less than an hour. If you want
209
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
to go ashore, now is your time to do iL If
you stay with me, I assure you I shall take
you to France."
When the sails were loosed, and the crew
began to heave up the anchor, the customs
officers hailed a passing boat and went ashore,
threatening the captain with all the penalties
of the law.
Twenty-four hours later the shippers and
the customs officers lay dead in the ruins of
St. Pierre, and the bark Orsolina was far at
sea, on her way to France. *
When the morning of May 8 dawned,
bright and sunshiny, there was nothing in the
appearance of the volcano to excite appre-
hension, except the immense column of vapor
rising from the main crater. This was going
to an unusual height, but it was not particu-
larly dark in color, and a gende wind from
the east carried most of the ashes from it in
* The details of this incident were given to me by Mr.
Nicola Emilio ParravicinOy Italian Consul at Barfoadoes, who
lost a daughter at St. Pierre and spent a week or more search-
ing the rains after the destruction of the city. The owncis
of the Orsolina were the Brothers Pollio, of Meta, near Na^
pies. They owned also the Italian bark North American,
which was lost in the catastrophe.
no
I
DESTRUCTION OF ST. PIERRE
the direction of Precheur, so that the atmos-
phere south of the mountain was compara-
tively clear. At seven o'clock that morning
there were eighteen vessels at anchor in the
roadstead, including the British steamer Rod-
dam ; the repair steamer Grappler, of the
West India and Panama Cable Company ;
the steamer Roraima, of the Quebec Line,
which had just arrived from Dominica ; the
French ship Tamaya from Nantes ; and the
Italian barks Theresa Lovigo, Franchesa
Sa Cro Cuore, and North American. The
repair steamer Pouyer Quertier, of the French
Cable Company, had just gone out to grapple
for a broken cable, and was about eight miles
off the coast, nearly opposite the mouth ot
Riviere Blanche.
A little before eight o'clock there were
three or four big-gun reports, like those that
startled us at Vive on the night of May 26,
and at two minutes past eight, by the time
of the French Cable Company, the volcano
suddenly exploded, with a great roar, in two
different directions. One discharge, of in-
tensely black vapor pierced with lightning-
flashes, went directly upward from the main
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
crater, while the other shot out laterally, ap-
parently from a new fissure in the side of the
mountain, and swept the whole southwestern
slope from St. Pierre to the mouth of the
Riviere La Mare. Both discharges consisted
mainly of superheated steam carrying im-
mense quantities of intensely hot dust, and
both probably had an initial velocity of. five
or six hundred feet per second.f If the dis-
charge that went upward from the main crater
had been directed downward, along the slope
of the volcano, and the discharge that went
downward from the fissure had been sent up-
ward, through the main crater, the results
would probably have been very much the
same.
As seen from Morne Rouge, from the
Grande Reduit, from Mont Parnasse, from
the vessels in the roadstead, and from the
bridge of the Pouyer Quertier, eight miles
f Mr. Robert Mallet, the eminent English authority on
earthquakes and volcanoes, g^ves 600 feet per second as the
initial velocity of a column of dust-charged vapor projected
to a height of 4^225 feet from the crater of Vesuvius in the
eruption of 1872. (Introduction to " The Eruption of Ve-
suvius of 18721*^ by Professor Luigi Palmieri, p* 9if Lon-
don, 1873.)
212
<
'" THE HEW YO?.K
;PJBUC UBKAKY
THE TRAGEDY OF PELEE
color, which might have been a glow, was
also noticed by Mr. Guirouard from the
Grande Reduit and by Francesco d'Angelo
from the deck of the Roraima ; but even this
was not a flame-like appearance. Father
Mary, at Mome Rouge, saw in the cloud
what he called " fuses," or rocket-like bursts
of gray smoke ; but they did not produce
flame, and might have been caused by up-
rushes of mud and steam from the slope
over which the discharge was moving. The
upper surface of the cloud, from his point of
view — 1,400 feet above the sea — was level,
like the surface of a great plain, and it looked,
he said, ^^ as if all Martinique were sliding
into the sea."
When this blast of superheated steam and
hot dust struck St. Pierre, with a velocity of
not less than a hundred miles an hour, it
produced all the effects that a West Indian
hurricane would produce if the moving air had
a temperature of, say, 250° Fahrenheit, and
were sweeping along with it great quantities of
fine sand and small stones which were even
hotter than the blast that carried them. All
the trees in the track of the discharge were
214
DESTRUCTION OF ST. PIERRE
blown down or stripped of their branches ;
most of the houses were unroofed, partly de-
molished, and set on fire by the hot dust ;
and all of the vessels in the roadstead, except
two, were capsized and totally wrecked. The
British steamer Roddam, set free by the part-
ing of her anchor-chain, succeeded in making
her escape, and reached the island of St. Lu-
cia with twelve of her officers and men dead,
and ten others so severely burned that they
had to be taken to a hospital. The masts,
funnel, bridge, and boats of the Roraima were
carried away by the tremendous force of the
blast ; her decks were swept by a storm of
stones, pumice, and hot ashes, and she took
fire fore and aft. Only two of her passengers
— little Margaret Stokes and her nurse —
escaped alive, and out of her crew of forty-
seven men, twenty-eight died from burns and
shock.
The whole population of St. Pierre per-
ished, with the exception of a woman in a
cellar who died shortly after being taken out,
and a negro prisoner in the dungeon of the
city jail. Thousands were killed by stones
and falling walls, and thousands more by the
"5
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
intense heat of the blast, and the still greater
heat of the dust with which it was charged.
From the fact that the hot hurricane did not
instandy kill all of the sailors exposed to it
on the Roddam and Roraima, it is fair to
presume that it did not instandy kill all of
the people exposed to it in St. Pierre ; but as
the city took fire from end to end, and soon
became a roaring furnace of flame, the badly
burned survivors of the blast, who had no
place of refuge, must finally have been
roasted to death in the streets. The heat of
the flaming city was so great that the steamer
Marin, from Fort de France, which reached
the scene of the disaster about 11:30 a. m.,
could not approach the shore.
The discharge of the hot hurricane-cloud
of steam and ashes from the lateral fissure of
the volcano was followed almost immediately
by total darkness, due pardy to the dust car-
ried by the blast itself, and partly to the
mushrooming out overhead of the vapor-
column thrown up simultaneously from the
main crater. It was not ordinary darkness,
like that of a cloudy, moonless night, but the
complete obscurity of a windowless cellar or
216
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
a rain of liquid mud ; the thundering of the
invisible volcano ; the cries and groans of the
dying ; and the mysterious suddenness and
horror of the whole catastrophe, must have
shaken the nerves, and almost the reason, of
the strongest and bravest men.
The total darkness lasted about half an
hour. Before nine o'clock it began to clear
up, and the sun came out, like a red ball, in
an atmosphere of smoky haze. The volcano
was then hidden from sight in a mantle of
dark vapor ; the sky to the northward was
black with falling ashes; St. Pierre was a
mass of flames, from the Morne d' Orange to
the Riviere des Peres, and thirty thousand
people lay dead in its burning ruins. The
survivors of the unprecedented disaster were
twenty or thirty officers and sailors on the
steamers Roddam and Roraima ; half as
many more floating on pieces of wreckage in
the water ; a few writhing in the agony of
their burns at the northern end of Carbet ;
two French gentlemen in a wrecked carriage
on the Grande Reduit ; one woman in the
cellar of a St. Pierre house ; and one negro
prisoner in the dungeon of the jail. Every
218
DESTRUCTION OF ST. PIERRE
other person in the track of the volcanic dis-
charge was either dead or dying.
The clearest and most intelligible accounts
of the disaster, as it appeared to observers on
the wrecked vessels in the roadstead, are those
given by Chief Officer Scott, Second Engineer
Evans and Francesco d' Angelo, of the Quebec
Line steamship Roraima. Mr. Evans was on
deck when the hurricane-cloud burst out of
the mountain, and he watched its descent un-
til it struck the northern suburb of St. Pierre,
beyond the Roxelane. ^ As the first houses
in that quarter of the city burst into flames,
he rushed below, with his associate Morris,
and took refuge in the engine-room. The
blast swept over the steamer with a great roar,
carrying away bridge, masts, smoke-stack and
boats ; smashing the engine-room skylights ;
and careening the ship until water came in-
board over the lee rail. There was no flame
in the hurricane-cloud, but it was so intensely
hot that it burned or scalded flesh, even under
the protection of clothing, and made breath-
ing, for a moment, almost impossible. When
Evans grouped his way on deck, in the dark-
ness that followed the blast, the steamer was
219
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
on fire in five places. Captain Muggah, who
was terribly burned, jumped or fell overboard
in the confusion that followed the disaster, and
the command then devolved upon Chief
Oflicer Scott, who had taken refuge in the
steerage and had escaped serious injury.
Under his direction, half a dozen of the crew,
who were badly burned but not completely
disabled, began a desperate fight with the fire
in the steerage deck-house, forward, where
the hot volcanic dust had ignited a pile of
mattresses, directly over two or three thou-
sand cases of kerosene. Water was hauled up
in buckets and thrown into the deck-house
through the door until the flames had been
subdued a little, and then the mattresses were
dragged out and thrown overboard. After
an hour or two of hard work, the most dan-
gerous fires were gotten under control ; al-
though combustible matter was still burning
or smouldering in various parts of the ship.
From the account of the disaster given by
Chief Oflicer Scott,* it is clear that the
Roraima was set on fire by the ignition of
* Frank Leslie* s Popular Monthly, July, 1902. p. 233.
220
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
their rescue between two and three o'clock in
the afternoon. Twenty-eight survivors were
taken from the wrecked steamer, but twenty
of them were so burned that they died, either
on the Suchet or in hospital at Fort de
France.
The story told by Francesco d'Angelo, an
intelligent sailor of the Roraima, differs in
some respects from the account given by
Messrs. Scott and Evans, but presents the
disaster from another point of view and adds
a number of interesting details. Just before
the hurricane cloud struck the ship, d'An-
gelo, with two Italian sailors named Suzino
and Avello, rushed pell-mell into the forecas-
tle and fell at full length on the floor. Half
a dozen other men, who were running a few
feet behind them, tumbled over their bodies,
just in time to screen them partially from
the force and heat of the blast. All the men
at the top of the heap perished ; but the
three Italian sailors at the bottom were so
covered up and protected that they escaped
without mortal injury. Crawling out from
under the bodies of their writhing comrades,
they returned to the deck; saw that the
ft22
#
DESTRUCTION OF ST. PIERRE
steamer was on fire forward ; and, fearing an
explosion of the kerosene in the fore-hold,
jumped into the sea. The water was covered
with fragments of wreckage blown from the
decks of other vessels, and, seizing the first
floating object that came to hand, they drifted
iway in the darkness toward the point of
Carbet.
When it grew light again, they saw float-
ing near them an overturned deck-house
From the bark North American. On this
ieck-house were three Italian sailors, who
dad been blown overboard in it, but had not
been burned or injured in any way. Leaving
the spar that had hitherto supported them,
I'Angelo, Suzino and Avello swam to the
ieck-house, and were helped to climb up on
It by their unhurt fellow-countrymen from
the bark. For the next three or four hours
they drifted around in the roadstead, carried
hither and thither by winds and currents, but
not getting far away from the burning city.
At some time in the course of this drift —
i'Angelo thinks it was after noon-*— they
:ame across Captain Muggah, still alive and
:linging to a piece of wreckage. He was
223
THE TRAGEDY OF PELEE
nearly naked ; his face was burned almost
beyond recognition ; and he seemed to be
totally blind ; but he was conscious, and
asked for water and help. They had no wa-
ter to give him, but they took him on the
deck-house, and there, soon afterward, he
died.*
In the course of the day d'Angelo and
his companions picked up a number of float-
ing or swimming survivors of the disaster,
including a Spaniard and two negroes ; but
they were all so terribly burned that they
died in a few hours. About the middle of
the afternoon the deck-house drifted in-shore
near the mouillage, or southern end of the
city ; and as the fires in that quarter had
nearly died out, d'Angelo and one of the
sailors from the North American swam
ashore to get a boat which they could see
lying on the Place Bertin. The boat proved
to be shattered and unseaworthy ; but they
found fresh water running from one of the
* The account of Captain Mugg^h^s death gpiven by Chief
Officer Scott differs in some respects from this, but there
seems to be no doubt that he died on a raft, or a piece of
wreckage, some hours after he leaped or fell overboard.
224
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
killed or fatally burned every person who was
fully exposed to it, both on shore and on the
vessels in the roadstead. The only excep-
tions of which I am aware are Messrs. Simo-
nut and Lassere, who were just in the edge of
the blast on the Grande Reduit, and possibly
a few officers and sailors of the British steamer
Roddam. I have been unable to ascertain
how many of the crew of that vessel had shelter
nor how many finally recovered from their in-
juries. In the city of St. Pierre perished the
governor of the colony and his wife ; Colonel
Gerbault, Chief of Artillery, and his wife ;
the British and American consuls and their
families ; twenty-four priests ; seventy-one
women belonging to Roman Cdtholic sister-
hoods ; all the professors of the Lycee except
five ; all the members of the scientific volcano
commission except one ; * and the flower
of Martinique's French population.
According to the best estimate that the act-
ing Governor of Martinique could make,
* Major Mirville, chief pharmacist of the Military Hos-
pital at Fort de France, had been appointed a member of this
commission, but was accidentally prevented from going to St.
Pierre with the other members on the 7th of May.
226
DESTRUCTION OF ST. PIERRE
there were between jOjOCX) and 3 i,ooo people
in the area swept by the hot volcanic blast.
Probably not more than thirty of them es-
caped death, and only four, so far as I could
ascertain, were uninjured. In comparison
with such a disaster as this, the destruction of
Pompeii seems an event of little importance.
Never before, I think, within historic times,
were thirty thousand people killed, in less
than three minutes, by the direct action of a
volcano. What were the proximate causes of
the unprecedented catastrophe ? Were the
destructive agencies involved therein new?
Or did Mont Pelee act merely as other vol-
canoes had acted, and exhibit forces that had
been observed in operation before and that
had produced the same results in other
cases ?
»»7
XI
THE CAUSES OF THE
CATASTROPHE
IT will probably be impossible to explain
satisfactorily the destruction of St.
Pierre, until a careful and thorough
examination shall have been made of the
crater and southwestern slope of the volcano,
from which the destroying blast came. It was
impossible for us to make such examination,
for the reason that the crater was too active
and the slope too hot. We availed ourselves
of every opportunity to study the mountain
that time and chance gave us, but our obser-
vations were necessarily limited, and conclu-
sions based upon them must, therefore, be
tentative and, in part, conjectural.
The first question that presents itself is,
" What was the source of the volcanic dis-
228
THE NEW YORic
CAUSES OF THE CATASTROPHE
charge that swept over the city ; did it come
from the lower crater in the valley of the
Riviere Blanche, or from the main crater on
the summit ? " With regard to this question
there are differences of opinion.
When we went up the western coast of the
island in the tug Rubis on the 5th of
June, we saw, about 10 a. m., a very energetic
eruption from the Riviere Blanche crater.
We could not determine, with perfect accu-
racy, the location of the vent from which the
tremendous outburst of mud-smoke came ;
but it seemed to be situated low down on the
slope, and not more than a mile and three-
quarters from the coast line. The latest
French chart of Martinique shows, on the
right bank of the Riviere Blanche, nearly due
east from Precheur, an unnamed peak, or ele-
vated ridge, with a height of 2,29.6 feet. At
the beginning of the eruption we could see
this peak distinctly ; and the uprush of mud-
colored vapor shbwed greatest explosive en-
ergy at a point seven or eight hundred feet
below and about fifteen hundred feet south-
east of its summit. If the sub-crater be situ-
ated there, it must lie nearly five hundred
229
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
feet below the main crater, and a mile and
three-quarters away from it, on a line run-
ning about S. 30° W. This is very nearly
the position given to it by Mr. Robert T.
Hill, of the United States Geological Survey ;
but it does not correspond at all with the po-
sition of the Etang Sec, or Dry Lake, where
destructive activity on this side of the moun-
tain began. According to the French scien-
tific commission of 1852, the Etang Sec was
situated at the very head of the Riviere
Blanche, perhaps a mile from the present
main crater and 2,871 feet above the sea. The
uprush of mud-vapor that we saw came from
a point about a mile and three-quarters from
the main crater, and not more, I think, than
1,500 or 1,600 feet above the sea.
The exact location of this sub-crater would
not, perhaps, be a matter of particular im-
portance if it had not been generally assumed
that the blast which destroyed St. Pierre
came from this particular vent. I do not
think, myself, that such was the case ; but it
is necessary to have some idea of the topog-
raphy of the mountain on its southern and
western sides in order to understand what
130
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
was continuous. I had observed the same
phenomenon from Acier during the great
eruption of May 28, and noted it, at that
time, as " an apparent widening of the crater
in the direction of St. Pierre." What seemed,
from that point of view, to be a sudden and
extraordinary increase in the width of the as-
cending vapor-column was nothing more than
its extension down the fissure, or series of
vents, in the gorge of the Riviere Blanche.
I think it probable, therefore, that from the
great steep-sided amphitheatre under the
main crater there extends downward, in a di-
rection somewhat west of St. Pierre, an open-
ing, or openings, from the interior of the
volcano, in the shape of a fissure, or a series
of vents, from which dust-charged vapor rises
during an eruption.
The direction of this line of cleavage from
the V-shaped opening under the main crater
is S. 30° W., while the direction of St. Pierre
from the same point is S. 10° W. The out-
side lines of the explosive blast of May 8
were, proximately, due south and S. 50° W.
radially away from the summit crater. The
distance of St. Pierre from that crater is a
232
CAUSES OF THE CATASTROPHE
trifle more than four miles and a quarter, and
from the sub-crater in the valley of the
Riviere Blanche about two miles and three-
fifths. The existence of a fissure, or a series
of vents, in the trough between these two
craters is not at all certain; but I can
think of no other explanation of the long
wall of mud-smoke that I saw rising from
the line of the trough when I was in Morne
Rouge.
Every eruption of mud-smoke from the
lower crater seemed to be accompanied by an
increased discharge of the same kind of vapor
from the main crater, and immediately after-
ward there were uprushes of white steam, in-
termittent floods of hot water, and geysers of
liquid mud in the beds of all the streams and
from the surface of the slope. I do not think,
however, that there were any openings from
the interior of the volcano on that side ex-
cept the Riviere Blanche crater, and the fis-
sure or line of vents running from it to the
crater on the summit. The vapor-jets and
mud-geysers were probably nothing more
than simple explosions, due to the sudden
escape of steam that had formed in the hot
•33
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
lower depths of the semi-liquid but surface-
hardened mud-slope.
The dust-charged vapor that came out of
the two craters often seemed to be heavier
than the air around it, and showed a tendency
to roll in great billows or convolutions down
the side of the mountain as well as down the
trough of the fissure. The greater part of it
was thrown upward, of course, by the force of
the subterranean explosion ; but around the
edges of the craters, where it overflowed like
a liquid and escaped the upward blast from
below, it roii^d down the slope as if it were
sinking of its o^wweight in a medium of less
density. The move^Mttit, however, was slow,
and the vapor, after fallmfca few hundred feet,
generally drifted away hon^ontally in the di-
rection of Precheur. Photograht^ taken from
St. Pierre between the loth and )s^^ ^^ ^^Y
show that this mud-smoke, at tirJl^s> rolled
quite down to the level of the sea, c^'^^^'^
covering the slope of the volcano andtaffl
from sight everything north of the r7!S. ^
Blanche. Judging from what we saw, how-
ever, the downward movement of the vapor
had no great force,and was dueeither to its own
234
CAUSES OF THE CATASTROPHE
specific gravity or to a down-draught of air.
A vapory inundation of that kind might have
choked and suffocated the inhabitants of St.
Pierre, but it would not have blown down
houses and trees ; it had not energy enough.
The blast that destroyed St. Pierre was like
the discharge of a colossal gun, while the roll-
ing of the mud-smoke down the trough of the
Riviere Blanche was like the rolling down of
fog from one level to another in the mountain
glen.
The topographical situation of the lower
crater, moreover, is such that it could hardly
have thrown a vaporous discharge toward St.
Pierre with force enough to produce the ob-
served effects. I n the first place, it seems to
be down in a valley, and the slope of the
ridge that bounds this valley on the south
would have turned the discharge upward, even
if its original direction had been horizontal.
In the second place, the fallen trees on the
arete between the Riviere des Peres and the
Riviere Blanche lie down the slope, with their
r^ roots toward the top of the mountain and their
heads toward St. Pierre. If they had been
overturned by a blast from the lower crater,
*35
THE TRAGEDY OF PELJ&E
they would lie across the arete, with their roots
toward the Riviere Blanche and their heads
toward Morne Rouge. Finally, in an explo-
sion of any kind, a blast of extraordinary vio-
lence on one side indicates the existence of a
wall or unyielding barrier behind the blast on
the other side. The tendency of exploding
gases is to expand equally and evenly in all
directions ; but if escape on one side be cut
off by an unyielding wall, the lateral force of
the explosion on the other side will be greatly
increased.*
There is no such wall north of the lower
crater, but there may be north of the summit
fissure, at or above the Etang Sec. All in-
* The extraordinary violence of the lateral blast caused by
the explosion of the Toulon powder-magazine, in March,
1899, was due, apparently, to the fact that the massive wall
of the magazine on one side did not yield imtil after the wall
on the other side had given way ; so that, as Colonel Buck-
nill says, there was ** practically formed a sort of cannon or
mortar.** The unyielding back wall greatly increased the
lateral violence of the explosion in front of it, and the blast
thus formed threw stones to a distance of two miles and a half
and blew in doors and windows at a distance of four miles and
a third, the discharge taking the horizontal line of least resist-
ance and leaving objects to the right and left of that line un-
injured. — Engineerings London, May 26, 1899.
CAUSES OF THE CATASTROPHE
dications, therefore, furnished by the topog-
raphy of the mountain, the position of fallen
trees, and the boundaries of the devastated
area, go to show that the destructive blast did
not come from the crater in the valley of the
Riviere Blanche, but had its origin at or near
the summit of the volcano.
The next question raised by the catastrophe
relates to the nature of the volcanic discharge.
Was it composed mainly of superheated steam
densely charged with hot dust, or did it consist
largely of inflammable gas which took fire
in the air at a distance from its place of origin ?
Two, at least, of the American geologists who
went to Martinique to investigate the erup-
tion support the gas-explosion theory, for the
reason, apparently, that it accounts for the
flames said to have been seen in the hur-
ricane-cloud. But, as a matter of fact,
did the cloud burst into flame ? I think
not.
The frequent reference to " flame,** " lava,"
" burning gas," and " a rain of fire," in the
early accounts of the disaster, were due, I
think, partly to inaccurate observation, partly
to the appearance of lightning-flashes in the
»37
THE TRAGEDY OF PELfiE
lateral discharge,* and partly to excitement
and a confused blending of effect with cause.
It is perfectly natural to associate intense
heat with visible flame; and when a cloud
burns flesh and sets fire to every inflamma-
ble object that it touches, the average ob-
server concludes that it must contain the
flame that it communicates ; and if he has
happened to see in it a lightning-flash or two,
he declares, without hesitation, either that it
came out of the volcano in the shape of a
"whirlwind of fire," or that it suddenly
" burst into flame " in mid-air. Some of
the sailors of the Roraima insisted that they
were burned by " tongues of flame " as they
lay on the floor in the forecastle ; but when
they were closely questioned and their atten-
tion was called to the fact that their clothing
was not scorched, they had to admit that they
did not actually see the " tongues of flame,**
* If the cloud was lighted up at intervals by electric stars,
such as those that we saw in the volcanic mantle over Vive,
miles away from the crater, on the night of May 26, such
stars might easily be taken for flamelike explosions of gas ;
but the most trustworthy observers say that they saw no elec-
tric discharges of that kind.
238
CAUSES OF THE CATASTROPHE
but thought that there must have been flames
to set the ship on fire. Volcanic dust, how-
ever, is often hot enough to set fire to wood,
and even to green trees. Dr. James Hector,
Director of the Geological Survey of New
Zealand, says that the dust ejected from the
volcano of Tarawera in June, 1886, was "so
hot as to set fire to trees, the stumps of which
were seen burning in many places." *
If there was any flame, or any great ex-
plosion of inflammable gas in the lateral
cloud-discharge that swept down on St.
Pierre, it could hardly have escaped the no-
tice of Father Mary, Messrs. Simonut and
Lassere, Mr. Guirouard, Mr. Fernand
Clerc, Engineer Evans, and Mr. Montera —
seven educated and intelligent observers, who
were watching the eruption from Morne
Rouge, the Grande Reduit, Mont Parnasse,
the deck of the Roraima, and the bridge of the
Pouyer Quertier. I shall therefore dismiss
all stories of flame and explosions of inflam-
mable gas as unworthy of serious considera-
tion, for the reason that they do not seem to
-^Preliminary Report to the Govemmenty Nature^ Vol.
34, p. 389.
239
THE TRAGEDY OF PELJ&E
be adequately supported by credible testi-
mony, and for the further reason that all the
results of the eruption may be satisfactorily
accounted for without assuming the existence
of flame or gaseous explosions in the volcanic
cloud. The lateral discharge was hot, just
as the simultaneous discharge from the main
crater was hot, and for the same reason ; but
there was no flame in the one or the other
As a means of accounting for the great
destruction of life in St. Pierre, it has been
supposed— or perhaps I should say conjec-
tured — that the hurricane-cloud contained
asphyxiating as well as inflammable gases ;
but this supposition seems to me no better
supported than the other.
Messrs. Lassere and Simonut, who were
struck by the blast on the Grande Reduit ;
Evans and Morris, the second and fourth en-
gineers of the Roraima ; Franceso d'Angelo,
Giuseppe Suzino, and Salvadore Avello, Ital-
ian sailors on the Roraima ; and Auguste
Ciparis, the prisoner in the dungeon of the
city jail, all declare that they were not choked
by gas, and that they smelled nothing un-
usual except a slight sulphurous odor which
240
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£e
in this lava-column is under enormous pres-
sure, and is prevented from expanding only
by the unyielding walls of the chimney within
which it is confined. As the lava-column
rises in the chimney, it comes at last to a
place where the weight of the rocks in the
throat of the choked-up vent above, or the
resistance offered by the sides of the narrow-
ing cone, is less than the expansive force of
the imprisoned steam. The cone then gives
way at its weakest point — generally at the
summit-crater, where it has given way in
earlier eruptions — ^and the superheated steam,
suddenly released from pressure, explodes
with tremendous violence, blowing into fine
dust the molten rock which holds it, and
finally escaping, with the dust, in a hot blast
which goes upward through the crater, or out
laterally through a fissure, like the discharge
from a colossal gun.*
* ** Whatever may be its source, we cannot doubt that to
the enormous expansive force of superheated water (or its
component gases dissociated by the high temperature) in the
molten magma at the roots of volcanoes, the explosions of a
crater and the subsequent rise of a lava-column are mainly
due. The water or gas dissolved in the lava is retained there
by the enormous overl3ring pressure of the lava-column ; but
242
CAUSES OF THE CATASTROPHE
This, it seems to me, is what happened in
Martinique on the 8th of May. The expan-
sive force of the steam dissolved in the lava-
column was so great that it not only exploded
upward through the main crater, but blew
out a part of the mountain side, and pro-
jected, through the fissure thus formed, a
lateral discharge of superheated steam and
molten lava dust which swept the southwest-
ern face of the volcano like a red-hot hurri-
cane. The weight of the dust carried by
the steam, and perhaps at first the density of
the steam itself, had a tendency to de-
press the blast, so that it followed the slope
when the molten material is brought up to the siu^ce, the
pressure is relieved and the water vaporizes and escapes. . . .
Where the relief is sudden and extreme, the escape of the
water-vapor may be by an explosive discharge."
** The aqueous vapor, which is so largely dissolved in many
lavas, must exist in the lava-column under an enormous pres-
sure at a temperature far above its critical point — even at a
white heat — and therefore possibly in a state of dissociation.
The sudden ascent of lava so constituted relieves the pressure
rapidly, without sensibly affecting the temperatiu'e of the
mass. Consequently, the white-hot vapors at length explode
and reduce the molten mass to the finest powder, like water
shot out of a gun." — "Text-Book of Geology," by Sir
Archibald Geikie, pp. 215, 266. New York, 1893.
243
THE TRAGEDY OF PELEE
of the mountain down, almost as if it had
been a liquid. According to the estimate of
Mr. Fernand Clerc, upon which I place most
reliance, it went from the fissure to the sea in
a period of time that was not less than two
nor more than three minutes, or at an average
speed-rate of from ninety to one hundred and
thirty-five miles an hour. The temperature
of the molten rock when the bursting expan-
sion of the steam that it contained blew it
into fine dust was probably above 2,000°
Fahrenheit ; but the blast cooled rapidly in
its four-mile course to the sea, and when it
struck St. Pierre the steam was not hot
enough to kill instantly, although it scalded
flesh under clothing, and the dust was not
hot enough to burn everything, although it
set fire to objects of a particularly inflamma-
ble nature. As there were no closed win-
dows in St. Pierre houses (and the windows
would have been blown in even if they had
been closed), the dust rushed into all the in-
teriors, and found inflammable objects in al-
most every apartment. This was probably
the reason for the sudden bursting into flame
of the whole city. The houses took fire
244
THE TRAGEDY OF PELEE
the lateral discharge from Mont Pelee.* The
fact that volcanoes in general throw out im-
mense quantities of steam, mixed with a very
small quantity of other gas, made it ante-
cedently improbable that Mont Pelee would
suddenly reverse the proportions by ejecting
an immense volume of inflammable gas, mixed
with only a small volume of steam. There is
no trustworthy evidence, moreover, that it
did do so.
If there had been any explosion of gas in
the air on the southwestern face of the moun-
tain, and if this had been the cause of the de-
struction, trees would have been blown down
* ** Steam has been estimated to form nine hundred and
ninety-nine one-thousandths of the whole cloud which hangs
over an active volcano." — Geikie^s "Text-Book of Geol-
ogy*" P- 193-
**The vapors which are emitted by the liquid lava of
the volcano are at least ninety-nine per cent, steam, or vapor
of water." — ** Characteristics of Volcanoes," by James D.
Dana, pp. 7-8. N.Y., 1890.
*<St. Clair Deville and Fouque have shown that the
gaseous ejections, of which steam forms probably ninety-
nine per cent., are such as rise from water admitted to a pre-
exist ent focus of high temperature." — Robert Mallet, in in-
troduction to "The Eruption of Vesuvius in 1872," by
Professor Luigi Palmieri. London, 1873.
2^8
CAUSES OF THE CATASTROPHE
radially on all sides of the center of ex-
plosion — westward on the western side, and
eastward on the eastern side ; but such was
not the case. In St. Pierre, in the valley of
the Roxelane, on the edge of the Grande
Reduit, and on the arete between the Riviere
des Peres and Riviere Seche, the trees all lie
with their heads directly away from a point
near the summit of the volcano, between the
Etang Sec and the main crater.
It has been urged in support of the gas-
explosion theory that the destruction ob-
served is too great to have been caused by a
blast originating so far away as the Etang Sec,
or even so far away as the lower crater ; and
that, consequently, it must have resulted from
a gaseous explosion in the erupted cloud at a
point in the air that was much nearer. This
argument, however, seems to me to have lit-
tle force. An accidental explosion of 1 83 tons
of gunpowder, at Toulon, France, in March,
1889, caused a lateral blast which carried
stones to a distance of two miles and a half,
blew in doors and windows at a distance of
four miles and a third, and produced a per-
ceptible shock at a distance of fifty miles ; and
»49
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
yet the force exerted by the most powerful
explosive that man can make is insignificant
in comparison with the energy exhibited by
such a volcano as Mont Pelee.*
But in the history of volcanic eruptions
there are other cases where lateral discharges
of superheated steam and hot dust have pro-
duced all the effects observed in Martinique.
The eruption of the Japanese volcano Bandai-
san, in 1888, was like the recent eruption of
Mont Pelee in almost every particular, in-
cluding horizontal blast, hot dust, darkness,
mud-rain, demolished houses, burned people,
and whole forests of overturned trees. The
explosion, or series of explosions, tore off a
portion of the side wall of the old crater ;
loosened an immense mass of rock, which fell
in an avalanche upon the lower slopes of the
mountain ; and liberated a blast of super-
heated steam and dust which swept, like *^ a
* Engineering (London), May ^26, 1899. See also
the description given by J. F. H. Herschel of the blast at
Dover, England, January 26, 1843, where eight tons of gun-
powder blew out of the side of a cliff 400, 000 cubic yards of
rock, weighing 2,000,000 tons, and scattered the fragments
to an average depth of fourteen feet over an area of eighteen
acres. — Journal of the Franklin Institute^ Vol. 35, p. 270.
250
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£E
to death, or otherwise killed, in the eruption
of the Japanese volcano, but the compara-
tively small loss of life was due to the fact
that the part of the country where the catas-
trophe occurred was thinly populated. If
there had been a city of thirty thousand in-
habitants in the Biwa-sawa valley, it would
probably have been destroyed by the hot
blast from Bandai-san, exactly as St. Pierre
was destroyed by the hot blast from Mont
Pelee.*
As I have been forced to give to the phe-
nomena of the Martinique eruption an ex-
planation that differs in some respects from
that given by most of the American geol-
ogists who visited the island, I am glad to
find myself supported, in part, by one of the
leading scientific men in the West Indies —
Dr. Nicholls, C.M.G., of Dominica. In a
letter written May 29 to Sir W. T. This-
elton-Dyer, Dr. Nicholls said : " It would
appear that a sudden fissure was opened on
* " The Eruption of Bandai-san,** by S. Sikiya, Professor
of Seismology, and Y. Kikuchi, Professor of Geology, in
the Imperial University of Tokyo. — Journal of the College oj
Science^ Imperial University, Vol. III. , Part 2. Tokyo, 1889.
252
CAUSES OF THE CATASTROPHE
the side of the moiintain overlooking the city,
and near the Etang Sec. On this flank of
the mountain a large vent belched out lava,
superheated steam, and acid gases downward,
on to St. Pierre and the roadstead. The
flashing oflTinto steam of the water imprisoned
in the incandescent lava converted that lava
into sand and dust before it reached the city ;
and the radiation of heat from the molten
rock, at a temperature of above i,ooo° Cen-
tigrade, caused an incredibly hot blast that
would create a red-hot hurricane — ^if I may
employ such a term — that would kill people
and animals instantly, and that would cause
all inflammable matter to burst into flame.
This, from what I gather, is what really hap-
pened ; and I do not think that poisonous
gases or electrical phenomena are accountable
for the destruction of life. You can imagine
what is the enormous heat right over the
vent of an active volcano. Well, St. Pierre,
practically, for a short time, was in such a
position, the vent being directed laterally
toward the city." *
* Nature (London), June 26, 1902
253
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL£e
This explanation of the catastrophe is brief,
but it seems to me to account satisfactorily
for all the effects produced and all the ob-
served phenomena for which there is
trustworthy testimony.
When we returned to Fort de France, after
our trip up the western coast of the island on
the tug Rubis, we thought that we should see
no more eruptions of Mont Pelee ; but just
before we sailed for New York, the volcano
gave us a final exhibition of its majesty and
power. Friday morning, a littie after ten
o'clock, as I sat in my room writing, I heard
the voice of Mr. Jaccaci calling to me in an
excited way from the lower landing ; and as I
rushed to my open door, he shouted : " Look
at the volcano ! There's another big erup-
tion ! " Mont Pelee was hidden from our
point of view by the intervening peaks of
Carbet ; but over those peaks, at a height of
two or three miles, I saw advancing, with ex-
traordinary rapidity, the sun-illumined edge
of a great volcanic cloud, which had been
formed evidently by the mushrooming out of
an immense column of dust-charged vapor
from the main crater. When I first caught
»S4
THE TRAGEDY OF PEL^E
suddenly into the sea from the western slope
of the volcano. This may or may not ac-
count for the oscillations ; but it is certain
that every great eruption of Mont Pelee since
the 8th of May has been attended or followed
by small tidal waves of this kind, and no
earthquake shock has been observed at any
point on the coast.
After the volcanic cloud passed the zenith
— fifteen miles and a half from the crater —
it lost its rapidity of motion ; but it contin-
ued to extend southward until it covered all
of the sky except a narrow strip just above
the horizon in the northeast, and another
similar strip in the south. It then overshad-
owed the whole of Martinique and probably
had a diameter of seventy-five or eighty
miles. It certainly showered ashes on the
island of St. Lucia, and caused such dark-
ness at Castries that the Royal Mail steamer
had to use a search-light in groping her way
into the harbor. In Fort de France there
was no fall of ashes and the darkness was like
that of a total eclipse. The sky to the west-
ward was intensely black, and the water of the
ocean under it looked like dark green marble
256
CAUSES OF THE CATASTROPHE
streaked with veins of malachite. On this
blackish -green sea, and under that hurricane
cloud, all lighter colors, and especially white,
assumed extraordinary vividness and brillian-
cy. The dull red of the harbor buoys became
bright scarlet, the dirty spritsails of a few
small fishingboats looked like squares of snow,
and the sides of the French cruiser Suchet
were so intensely and brilliantly white as to
be almost dazzling. At that time there was
no direct sunshine, and all the light we had
came from the narrow strip of uncovered sky
along the northeastern horizon.
The gloom lasted about three hours. At
one o'clock in the afternoon the volcanic
cloud began to drift slowly westward; at
three o'clock the sun was shining dimly in
an atmosphere filled with smoky haze ; and
two hours later there remained only a bank
of dark vapor, resting apparently on the
ocean off St. Pierre and Precheur.
This was the last eruption of the great
Martinique volcano that we witnessed. Three
days later we sailed on the Quebec liner Fon-
tabelle for New York.
•57
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